Guy Mees at the Palais des Beaux-Arts - Brussels, Belgium - Review of Exhibitions

The first part of this 35-year retrospective looked suspiciously like a compendium of the major movements in European art since the late '50s. Although Mees has shown fairly regularly in Belgium over the years, his work has garnered little attention, and the exhibition indicated why. But it ended on a happy note: around the age of 48, he finally hit his stride and has kept it in the decade since.

Mees was an active avantgardist in Antwerp at the end of the '50s and into the '60s, when the artists' collective G-58 and a handful of galleries started staging international exhibitions. In his early dirt reliefs, which obediently straddle the painting/sculpture divide, the fragile surfaces and subtle coloration lack the muscle of Fontana, whose works probably inspired them. This estheticizing tendency characterizes nearly all Mees's early work. For example, a '60s series called "Lost Space," Minimalist in intent, started out as wall-hung frames, rectangular or circular, wrapped in layers of industrially fabricated lace and occasionally illuminated from within by a straight neon tube that may extend beyond the frame, altering the contours amusingly. These works became increasingly volumetric and moved to the floor as translucent cubes and parallelepipeds. On one level, the lace is all wrong in that it conjures up a host of associations that Minimalism abjures. Visually it's ingenious, because it creates an illusion (another taboo) of spatial recession into the inaccessible (lost) space beyond the surface that Mees perhaps secretly desired to paint. Instead, he covered it with a thicket of ready-made lace motifs--flowers, foliage--that the eye can not penetrate.

Mees turned to the grid and seriality in the '70s, and this work, freed of structural restraints, fed into his present intuitive mode, which is both reductive and sensual. The early grids, on nondescript, now-yellowing sheets of paper joined at the edges, are marked with columns of short horizontal lines in six colors that shift in orderly sequences. The works got bigger (as much as 10 1/2 feet across) but Mees made them of subtly tinted, translucent papier de soie, which is as gossamer as paper gets. They're unframed, affixed to the wall with straight pins. The regiments of horizontal lines give way to wayward pastel specks disposed as if to illustrate chaos theory.

Gradually, the rectangle also succumbed. Mees indulged in eccentric shapes that led to his series of colored paper cutouts, which, like the lace pieces, are called "Lost Space" and similarly allude to both infinite depth and the painting surface. But the improvised cutouts are immediately striking for their free-form linearity and joyous abandon. Typically each is composed of several elements puzzled together on the wall and fixed with pins. They are frequently presented in pairs or clusters, sparking a dialogue that includes the surrounding architecture. Matisse and the visual pleasure he scissored from colored paper come to mind slightly in advance of Fontana's slashed canvases. That's having your cake and eating it, too.

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