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. Through their eyes we see the world. 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 tries out different ways of [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. (Text by Sofie Verraest)
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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. Through their eyes we see the world. 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 tries out different ways of [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. (Text by Sofie Verraest)
