Aglaé Bassens is a painter interested in the overlap of the private experience with the communal one. While her paintings stem from her own memories, the imagery feels approximate enough to belong to anyone else’s recollections. Calling attention to the overlooked and the everyday, each work begins with a photograph, either her own or found. Bassens siphons her personal memories, loading each image with feeling. At the same time, she edits and omits from each image, allowing it to be broad enough for anyone to identify with. Through her signature asymmetrical cropping and atmospheric treatment, she invites viewers to recognize something of their own in each painting.
Aglaé Bassens (b. 1986, Belgium) has a BA in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University (2007) and an MFA in Fine Art Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2011). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; HESSE FLATOW, New York, NY; 12.26, Dallas, TX; Nars Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; CRUSH Curatorial, New York, NY; and Cabin Gallery, London; as well as group exhibitions at Gowen Contemporary, Geneva; STEMS Gallery, Paris; The Valley, Taos, NM; and Workplace Gallery, London. Her work is featured in New American Paintings No. 134 Northeast Issue and in 100 Painters of Tomorrow published by Thames and Hudson. Bassens’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and Colección SOLO, Madrid, Spain. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
UZOMAH: This exhibition marks a new development in your practice with the use of a Polaroid camera and images as a starting point for your paintings. Did you know when preparing for this show that you would switch to a Polaroid camera, or were the digital images and found photographs no longer sparking the same response they had before?
AGLAE: I think it’s important to be able to visualize how your current practice could improve or begin to identify the ways it might develop and transform. I had been thinking about ways to shift something in the way I was making paintings when I got the Polaroid camera. I had been considering bigger changes involving subject matter or medium or painting support. But then I purchased a polaroid camera without articulating any distinct plan other than using the flash feature as I love exaggerated lighting and shadows in my paintings. When I looked at the prints I was worried about how little information there is compared to a high definition digital image. It was when I painted the first work from a Polaroid print (Idling) that something clicked: the lack of information allowed me to delve more in the texture of those ‘empty areas’, making the painting more tactile and atmospheric, somehow fuller while still depicting emptiness. I also love the reduced palette that made the new body of work really cohesive despite varied imagery.
