Michel Mouffe

Born in 1957 in Belgium. Lives and works in Brussels (Belgium), Le Poët-Laval (France), and La Mola (Spain). Since 1983 he has been exhibiting in Europe, the US and Asia. From 1990 until 1993 he lived and worked in New York.

«Stating the obvious, Michel Mouffe’s work is as luminous as it is opaque. Crystal clear though reluctant to immediate comprehension, it dwells at the fringe of our intelligence, static yet mobile, quiet but sometimes traversed by epic breath. Incandescent and silent, unquestionably modern although it secretly shivers with Cinquecento reminiscence, it is inoculated with joy and tainted with a dash of seriousness. A work related to spring, anxious not to forget the winter it was born of and conscious of the autumn it will return to, in a perpetual oxymoron combining contraries that don’t molest each other. Mouffe’s creation sometimes seems to be playing with itself, if not with us, combining intelligence and wit, making us more silent than talkative, more penetrated than we can penetrate those canvases-sculptures made by a mathematician who’d turned painter or a philosopher who’d swapped pens for brushes. Indeed, the painter’s work, at the edge of the abyss, inevitably invites to question the essence of existence. Precisely, his paintings summon us spectators and force us, through their implacable materiality, to be present with them and therefore, with ourselves. Simply put, when confronted with a painting by Michel Mouffe, it’s complicated to pretend it’s not there. Because the canvas, although it is made of inanimate matter deprived from eyes and consciousness, seems to be looking at us when we are around. Clearly, the Brussels artist’s works don’t suddenly open the doors to the supernatural. As a matter of fact, they combine visible and invisible, a skilful articulation of presence and absence, marrying time and timelessness in an intimate symbiosis of colour and space, of matter’s inertia and the vibrations that nevertheless animate it.»

Excerpt from: Michel Mouffe: Our Shares of Nothingness, Our Shares of Eternity...
by Xavier Van den Broeck