Genesis Belanger – One more good day

rodolphe janssen is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition at the gallery of American artist Genesis Belanger, which follows her first presentation in 2020 in the space at Livourne 32. From 13 April to 16 May 2024, One more good day will unfold in the entire space at Livourne 35.

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In his influential 1958 book The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard interprets the physical sites of the house by applying phenomenology to architectural space. Linking architecture to both psychological and sociological arenas, Bachelard employs the domestic as metaphor for the interiority of the subject. He states a “house that has been experienced is not an inert box.” Through this lens, space is made animate by those who occupy it, giving life to the home as a record of experience. It is by this human act of animating the domestic that divorces the interior from the rigid site of the inert; in doing so such spaces become activated, forming an interior life all their own.

The cross-disciplinary work of Genesis Belanger transforms the benign surfaces of the everyday into a surreal interpretation of the feminine subject. Utilizing craft-based disciplines of tailoring, ceramics and metal fabrication, Belanger constructs exquisite objects which transcend home design and fine art sculpture in the round. The artist’s matte palette of faded pastels speaks to the passage of time, where the vibrancy of the original becomes a nostalgic simulacrum in the present. Belanger’s work breaks open the evocative interpretation of domestic symbols, imbued with an uncanny lifeforce of static animation. The artist’s thoughtful attention to the surface places her sculptural works between illusionary softness and impenetrable rigidity. In these discrete objects, fingers emerge in place of combs (Tangle Free, 2024), tongues in place of lipstick (Handbag, 2024) and eyeliner in place of warpaint (War Paint (2 parts), 2024)—a comical, if not cynical play on the site in which the consumer object interacts with the intimacy of the body. Through Belanger’s artful interpretation of consumer products, these objects become enchanted antagonists within the commodified act of beautification.

In opposition to her sculptures, Belanger’s paintings and drawings are vibrant compositions that evoke flat, hard-edge renderings of a garish cartoonish domesticity. In a first for the artist, this exhibition foregrounds two-dimensional works, oWering an alternative perspective into the Belanger’s own interior world of metaphor. Contrasted together, these works construct a loose narrative of domestic symbols, injecting momentary significance into sites of the overlooked. In Sparkling and Fresh (2024), disembodied lips adorn a Cheshire smile atop an oversized toothbrush. When paired together with the frank poetics of a diamond ring lodged in a bathroom drain in Down the Drain (2024), these images leave the viewer as an implicit witness to the emotional ambiguity behind their intensely slick, yet bold façades.

Through Belanger’s elusive erotics, the body is formed into segmented clefts, folds, and curvatures akin to formal strategies sourced from a history of design, inviting the viewer as active participant the artist’s own post-modern femmscape. In this space the artist creates an alternative timeline, one which questions the arranged marriage of capitalist consumption to the gendered subject. In the world Belanger proposes, nothing is inherently inert, but active in the ongoing interrogation of how identity is formed, objectified and domesticated through our individual relation to an object oriented world.

— Alex Turgeon