JUXTAPOZ – Nathanaëlle Herbelin: There is a place you will not be able to return to @ Xavier Huffens, Brussels
Nathaniel HerbilinThe second exhibition in Kofayeh Hofkins It offers a new series of pictures and interiors that move in the fragile balance between the daily immediate experience and the weight of an unstable world. Immediately, these paintings reflect intimate and expanding the desire to stick to moments of communication – after important interactions with friends, neighbors and family – held hidden from sadness, uncertainty and changing reality. Herlin’s approach is neither emotional nor separate; Instead, it is painted with sharp awareness of how personal and collective history intertwines. The act of drawing becomes a way to influence itself, recognize absence, and witnesses to both calm rituals and emotional thresholds.
While Herlin’s previous works were characterized by vibrant colors and clear settings, the paintings in this exhibition adopt ambiguity. The numbers appear from unspecified or heavy backgrounds, focusing on being on the place, and memory on the preparation. ShowThe late artist from Israel, was drawn after his death from photographs. His depiction resists the traditional hierarchical series of acting – someone may not usually be immortalized on the fabric that gives here a quiet but fixed vision. Herbilin’s look is thin and unbearable, as the decoration was attracted to detect the rough intimate relationship of its topics.
It is also possible to feel the absent presence of the late Heerlin’s grandfather in two Herbilin’s works depicting the Jewish mourning rituals. in ShivaHerbilin, from memory, is rebuilt a bird’s view of her grandfather’s house during ShivaThe mourning period for seven days after a funeral. The painting reflects the charged atmosphere of these rituals, as the bereaved remains at home, which represents its loss through the rituals that pass the time: sitting on low chairs, covering mirrors, and lighting a candle in remembering. The second biggest work on this topic, Dîner aux œufs DRRS (Dinner with boiled eggs), explains SE’udat Havra’ahCondolences that follow the burial. Boiled eggs-besides bread, lentils and other round foods. The formation of the painting is inspired by Egon Schlele’s Die Freunde (Tafelrunde), GROß (Friends (round table), large), 1918. Just as Shil drew his own circle of his friends gathered around the table, the Herbilin. Dîner aux œufs DRRS With her own acquaintances as well as imagined characters.
While the images remain essential for Herlene’s practice, their exact images of the interior spaces are equally influential in transferring the mood and atmosphere, which reveals the psychological depths of their topics. Two internal views, in particular, raise contradictory facts and psychological spaces: one depicts an abandoned kitchen, UstensilesAnd the other, Jérémie qui Donne le biberonThe artist’s partner, Jérémie, feeds their child in a hotel room in China, where the artist recently completed a residence. The panoramic view that the window placed in the last plate contrasts starkly with the small window that is barely visible in the kitchen, which is an accurate indication of imprisonment and decreasing hope. Likewise, personal property at the hotel table stands unlike its almost strong absence in the kitchen, despite other evidence that indicates a modern human presence. The last painting carries a calm care of tension with the scenery of crowded, non -personal city, reflecting the contrast between special tenderness and breadth of the outside world.
The interaction between the internal and external spaces – the literal and psychological – in this new group of work reflects the artist’s negotiations on the past and the present, its existence and its absence. Whether rebuilding her grandfather’s apartment from memory, or seizing the intimate relationship crossing a common meal, or drawing characters from her neighborhood, Herbilin’s works resist easy accounts. Instead, her paintings provide space where he coexists every day and existential, as the action of the view itself becomes a recognition.
