AT ENCORE GALLERY

Delphine Somers is a self-taught painter based in Brussels. Her work treads the fine line between the archetypes that surface in folklore, myths, rituals, magic, and dreamworld, on the one hand, and the acutely contemporary, societal, and culturally specific, on the other. It explores the workings of both the human unconscious and the complex social reality, as well as the interplay between these two.

Influenced by medieval and renaissance painting, Somers’s visual language is pre-eminently narrative. Rather than depict an objective reality, her paintings capture the subjectivity of characters. As such, her work investigates the tension between the linearity of the stories we live with and the simultaneity of the 2D image of the painting. It experiments with capturing a story in a single image while reducing none of its complexity. Starting from the idea, moreover, that we are all multiple, Somers’s work probes the self as an assemblage of contradictory characters that manifest in different moments and stages of life and continue to inform our being in the world.

Somers presents a universe where people are shown in their awkwardness, a carnal and carnival universe where their most primal impulses go hand in hand with what makes them most sacred, where humans are allowed to be foolish and divine alike. 

For her first solo exhibition ‘Zelfs de goden zijn maar mensen’ at ENCORE Delphine Somers presents a series of paintings about Brussels made between 2020 and 2022 when she was simultaneously working in the Brussels cultural sector. Her paintings attempt to reflect the density and richness of the city we live in with its existing tensions, polarities and social stratification. They combine social actuality with the world of dreams and myth.

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BOOK OF MIRACLES

This is an ongoing series of paintings started in 2021, vaguely based on the 16th century Augsburg manuscript.

The Augsburg manuscript contains accounts and descriptions of miraculous signs that have been observed throughout history, starting in Old Testament times and continuing through Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Late Middle Ages right up to the middle of the 16th century.

The signs and miracles are interpreted to announce the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgement and the future kingdom of God. It contains miraculous signs not just from the time of the creation of humankind up to its own day but also those expected at the end of the world. With this series I want to continue the tradition and add a range of future social, political, mystical and humorous miracles to the series. These future miracles don’t lead up to the second coming of Christ, nor will they open the kingdom of God. With a little luck they show us glimpses of human nature and a world changing for, sometimes, the better.

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Opening on October 13th 2022 - From 6 to 9 PM
Exhibition from October 14th till October 30
Open on friday to sunday ; from 2 to 6pm And by appointment
Open mic for Brussels based poets and storytellers on October 16th from 4 to 6pm