About Lisa Vlaemminck: “The work is unavoidably and undeniably a LOT”

The artist opens the door of house number 74 with a smile and leads me into the kitchen. She begins preparing coffee on the stove and I inspect a china plate lying on the drying rack that looks conspicuously Austrian. Nostalgic flowers entwine with big, bold, black letters in a Fraktur typeface that read: Jede Stunde hat ihr Geheimnis (‘Every hour has its secret’). I am excited to see what these hours will have in store for me.

I follow Lisa up the green steel staircase into her studio on the first floor. While the photographer takes the last pictures, I sip my coffee and let my eyes wander around the room, where a mix of materials are to be found. Fading flowers next to fake flowers, huge piles of colourful dried paint next to mostly brown plastic models of food (chicken, sausages, baguettes, loaves of bread, croissants, pretzels, pizza slices). I don’t quite dare — yet — to properly look at the paintings, I only quickly scan them. I want to look at them up close, inspect them, look at the layers, the way they are painted, the way the paste was spread onto the canvas, the way the colours intermingle. I want to experience all the things you can’t quite see when you look at the installation shots of Vlaemminck’s work.

When I finally have the artist to myself, we start looking at the paintings together. The first thought I have: the work is unavoidably and undeniably a LOT. The colours, the motifs, the shapes. The canvases are overladen, loud and clashing. Screaming, bright acid hues on a dark, velvety background. The shapes: torsos, noses, flowers, cucumbers, chicken thighs, fish, potatoes, razors, scissors, holes, holes, holes. They are all seemingly bathed in UV/black light, each form floating on top of each other. There is a campiness and a craziness to them — I can’t help but think this is ‘too much’.

I am being suspicious of my own discernment: why do I feel an internal resistance towards the paintings? Is it my own Austro-German educational background that makes me immune to the potential beauty of the frenetic mix of different shapes and neon colours? Can I only enjoy muted, conceptual paintings? Or is that what is wanted by the artist: an internal wince?

We start talking about this moment of ‘too much’ and Lisa mentions La Grande Bouffe as an inspiration. It is a French-Italian film by Marco Ferreri from 1973, in which a group of friends get together to eat themselves to death. It seems that there is a similarity between the deathful over-saturation of food and Lisa’s overloaded canvases. The paintings are cluttered in shapes: some of them depict blood squirting from thorns and teeth and nails, with razors and scissors cutting through the image. There is opulence and violence in both the film and Vlaemminck’s work. A particular kind of taste, when what was once exquisite at first bite becomes vile through overconsumption. It is a similar mechanism to how aesthetic taste changes: what once was considered stylish can turn bad over time.

I am thinking of Susan Sontag, who describes the essence of ‘camp’ as ‘the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’: something she is both strongly drawn to and strongly offended by. Her examples of ‘camp’ include Tiffany lamps, the ballet Swan Lake and architecture in the art nouveau style. Sontag published her essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’ in 1964, on the eve of the destruction of Victor Horta’s iconic art nouveau building the Maison du Peuple. All that is to say: if taste can change, it can definitely make a comeback. The art nouveau architecture of Brussels was built in the 1890s, went out of fashion in the 1920s, was destroyed in the 1960s and unbeknownst to Sontag made a post-colonial comeback with two major shows at CIVA and Bozar in 2023.

And so did the Noughties: they have been having a moment in art, fashion, and diet culture — think Ozempic, drugs and low-rise jeans. That means rave-inspired, neon-coloured, glow-in-the-dark paintings can make a comeback, too. When I ask about the parallels to airbrush paintings that can be found at Goa trance parties and at the Foire du Midi, Lisa confirms that escapism is alluring to her. She likes creating a parallel universe with its own imagery: the night and club life, with its absence of natural light and its focus on evading the duties of the day, help her focus on the dichotomy of artifice versus nature. She is not interested in the lifestyle but intrigued by the idea.

I think it is important to distinguish between a ‘bad painting’ or ’ugly painting’ as a style or aesthetic by choice and a painting that is indiscriminately bad or ugly. Lisa doesn’t show up to make either. She is interested in PAINTING. The first layer of her multiple-layered paintings is constructed in a drawing in advance, everything else emerges while working on the canvas. Never more than one or two steps ahead, she carefully constructs the image on it, following her own logic.

When I ask about the significance of the motifs she uses, Lisa tells me that for her it is about the non-significance, the emptying-out of a symbol’s meaning. She wants them to become pure shape, so they can find new meaning in a new context. She is definitely not an abstract painter, but, by liberating forms from their initial meaning and layering them on top of each other, she seeks to lay a ground for paradox and friction. Here I think of Wittgenstein, who needed for language to have a strong, logical relation between the signifier and signified, and how Lisa vehemently insists on severing the ties between the two, as if they were part of a cityscape for the illiterate, where there is no language, just signs.

Lisa searches for words online to find the most universal vector depictions of objects that are interesting enough to use on the canvas. She is interested in their formal qualities, which she divides into the natural and the artificial. When there is too much of the one, she counters it with the other. Images of flying potatoes oppose the artificiality of an imaginary video game architecture, brown grilled chicken thighs complement connecting metal chains. The works are deceptive in their presence: so formulated and so loud, they seem to want to be heard, but if they were to talk, or rather scream, their words would scramble and their sentences would be rendered incomprehensible. The throbbing techno in the background would make sure of that.

Vlaemminck is preparing a solo exhibition that opens at the gallery rodolphe janssen in September this year. It is titled ‘Urschleim in silicon’ and refers to the primordial soup: the substance from which life supposedly originated — a theory introduced by German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1857 based on a suspicious slime found on the Atlantic seafloor. What seemed to be the missing link between inorganic matter (the slime) and organic life (us) was proven wrong 18 years later. Lisa Vlaemminck takes this error as a starting point to think about this mutant parallel world, where life can emerge from non-organic matter.

The two types of painting in the studio — her usual rectangular ones and a new, amorphous type — are separated not just by their form but an architectural anchor that has entered the works. Caves and courtyards that resemble architecture found in computer games serve as a novel background to the intense mix of black-lit shapes in the foreground. The new, rounded forms of the canvases seem to correspond to the holes that haunt all her paintings. They usually serve to cut through the multiple layers of paint, to go to the beyond, the dimension that potentially lies behind the work. Now the artist is stepping through the void, and the blob-shaped cavities are being filled in the process.