Marcel Berlanger's REG at Le Botanique, Brussels

Marcel Berlanger's exhibition REG at Le Botanique in Brussels (March 1 – April 22, 2012) transforms the institution into a scenographic and dramaturgical space. The title REG refers to desert zones and ironically echoes the site's former botanical function. A large horizontal painting, Hominid Gang, depicting a Kenyan reg, is elevated a few dozen centimeters off the ground, occupying the central space like a stage. On it sits a cube with six tire-speakers, a techno-scientific exploration device created by Jonathan De Winter, invited by Berlanger to orchestrate a dialogue between painting, sculpture, and noise music, linking to the Botanique's musical programming. Berlanger's approach stems from his previous scenographic and dramaturgical experiences (Penthesilea, 2007; le Soleil même pleut, 2010). Display devices like the Aigle troué, an aluminum frame on wheels, reflect these influences. In an interview within the exhibition, Berlanger recalls that in the 1990s, when he began, painting was losing institutional recognition to installation and video projections. Like other painters of his generation, he balances pictorial concerns with exhibition strategies, questioning painting's relationship to other media through both external (spatialization-installation) and internal (visible execution methods) devices. The result is a tension between pop imagery and modernist slowing of vision through method exposure, supported by precise dramaturgical arrangement of motifs and scales.