David Crunelle

Brussels-born artist David Crunelle lives and works in Turku, Finland. His practice is rooted in mixed media, centred on a highly technical, meticulous approach to collage, which he combines with acrylic paint and epoxy resin. His recent solo exhibitions include Intarsia (2019), Ordalie (2021) and Hopelessness (2023).

When our democracies show clear signs of decay, when they elect as their leaders the very people least likely to save them, when innovation means inventing new consumer needs rather than new forms of expression and collective life, when our societies are bent on destroying the very conditions of their survival, when, to put it simply, the situation is degenerating, it is important to lose oneself in art.

Aware that art has never saved the world, David Crunelle devotes himself to it. At a time when we are plunging blindly into the void, he knows that his paintings are tombstones rather than parachutes. His works are a politeness of despair, an aesthetic quest that has renounced grand rhetoric and denunciations, a quest that has no use for hope.

In the serenity of a Nordic retreat, surprisingly untouched by chaos, he devotes to art the last moments of peace that our dying world grants him. What a mad ambition it is to reject stupidity, ugliness and anguish. What derisory tools: scissors, glue and a jumble of paper. What an immoderate hope it is to carve our world to pieces, only to reorganise the remnants into complex assemblages laden with meaning. Between taut geometry and symbolic allusions, a reinvented beauty emerges. For beauty is part of our world, even if it will not prevail.

Of course, as always, those who denounce the game of hatred and violence and who seek ways to resist it are mocked, denounced and accused. There is no doubt that, before long, they will once again be branded as degenerates by those who flaunt their obscenity for all to see, hunted down and their works destroyed. Never mind, art is a battle lost before it has even begun. It is precisely for this reason that it is the guardian of our dignity and the revealer of the baseness of the scum.