Carmen Schabracq
Dionysian Days

As part of the ARV.I artist residency program, Carmen Schabracq concludes her artist-in-residence with a solo exhibition, titled Dionysian Days, at Gallery Heerz Tooya.

Little do you know, Apollo!

Lubricated with information, during the meridian hour, he stood still at the middle of the square. Too many people to talk to, and all of them are shy. Irrelevant and all too human, a perplexion was glowing around his face.

Like Schabracq's approach to portraiture, filmmaker Bela Tarr wants the actors to be, not act. In his film Satantango, there is a sequence of blissful hazards hanging out in a local bar - drinking, ad nauseum. The devil will have sent them turning in circles like the dancers of the farandole. Ultimately the devil is nothing but the fog - letting you question the nature of the dancing characters. Deviance is in play. In Schabracq's exhibition, we might have a feeling of something opaque hovering over sharp contrasts, bright colors, and excentricity. A sense of a perverted masquerade. You see someone as they are, but all too much - an unconditional impossibility.

The exhibition Dionisievi Dni is part of Schabracq's ongoing investigation of the notion of portrait - the inner soul of a person in accordance to its masked realities.

Chopped hydra's never stop asking questions.

She's still at the square, again vigorously shouting, "Little do you know, Apollo!". Yet, cars hiss by the window as nobody cares. Everybody knows her all too well, all her moves. Are we obliviously playing along, calling out the triple bluff, or perhaps more aware of what a thousand plateaus of identification entail?

-Lars Nordby

Carmen Schabracq was born in Amsterdam (1988), where she lives, works and obtained her BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2012). After a year of painting studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome in 2007/08 and in 2010 she did an exchange at the Sint Lucas Academie in Gent. In 2015 she obtained her MFA (theatre costume design) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, with her so called naked masks research. In 2017/18 she received the new maker subsidy from the Performing Arts Fund NL, with which she made two in-situ performances. In 2019 she did an artist in residency at Casa Lü in Mexico City where she made work about the local masks and the cultus around death. In 2020 she did the AiR of the Vincent van Gogh house in Zundert, were she researched whether a (painted) portrait could be a form of mask. In 2021 she received a development grant from the Amarte Foundation to work on large scale paintings in her temporary studio in an empty factory at the Hembrug terrain in Zaandam (NL) www.carmenschabracq.nl

The exhibition is supported by the Municipality of Veliko Turnovo. Many thanks to Tequila Bar Funky Monkey and Pernod Ricard for serving free drinks at the vernissage.