Stems Gallery is preparing to unfold a new chapter in its Brussels flagship location with the opening of Les Veilleuses, Marguerite Piard’s latest solo exhibition. A title that, translated as “The Night Lights,” evokes the intimate glow that dwells in darkness. In this pictorial territory, friends, family, and lovers settle in settings bathed in the warmth of humanity, where light not only illuminates but caresses. “Les Veilleuses is about our loved ones.”
Piard’s gaze, always precise and restrained, leads us to an emotional threshold similar to the complicit silence that two friends share without words. This atmosphere is echoed in her choice of medium: molded wood panels and polished stone slabs, surfaces that preserve the memory of matter. On them, the artist places bodies suspended in an ethereal, introspective clarity, where the subjects surrender themselves without resistance.
Through these autofictional encounters, Piard disrupts the usual narrative surrounding female nudity and desire, with an empathetic and artifice-free approach. “Address desire without sexualization. Glorify without pomp, through the prism of tenderness,” wrote Eloïse Duguay. In her universe, representation becomes a liberating act; bodies are not objects, but interlocutors of a shared emancipation: “From then on, her search for solace, for solitary and shared confrontations, became a mutual emancipation.”
In Duguay’s words, “For Marguerite Piard, painting and the body are one and the same. Both transform, narrate, transmit, experience, until they merge. They are bridges we cross and upon which our experiences are recorded, which the artist invites us not to hide.”
Those passing through Brussels can explore this luminous haven from August 14 to September 14. Stems Gallery, Rue du Prince Albert 4, 1050 Ixelles, Belgium.
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