De Buck Gallery is proud to announce If You Were Dreaming, Belgian artist Gommaar Gilliams’ third solo exhibition with the gallery. Marking Gilliams’ debut at De Buck Gallery’s Saint-Paul de Vence location, the show will be on view from September 18 to November 7, 2021. It will also be available online as part of the gallery’s virtual programming.
Gilliams breathes new life into the timeless arcadia of his on-going body of work, which explores the universality of longing, mythology and collective memory through an evocative new color palette and masterfully painted narratives. “I paint about an internal world, a world between dream and reality,” says Gilliams.
Oscillating between abstraction and representation, Gilliams weaves colors and textures with both allegorical symbols and human figures. Compositions framed in celestial elements and wreathes of textural flora beckon the viewer into lush spaces filled with fairytale castles and animals in motion. Gilliams’ motifs are dreamy, but intentional–the artist references both the history of painting and the history of art through this body of work. He examines the way that humans search for and utilize repeated symbolic imagery throughout time periods and cultures, tapping into our shared desires and our shared wonder for the natural world. The protagonists of his narratives, women gazing at the moon and figures running through landscapes, appear as archetypes meant to reference universal stories. Ultimately, Gilliams hopes his work will evoke an emotional bridge between past, present, and future, inspiring his viewers to unite in a space of “half-remembered” memories.
These works are also stunning examples of the artist’s unique painting process which reflects Gilliams’ interest in the ways in which a layered surface can mirror the conceptual layering of stories and memory. The works begin with an acrylic dye process in which Gilliams allows the paint to soak and stain the fibers of his fabric, a process he feels allows the color to be “inside” the fabric. He then combines these dyed fabrics in an assemblage and energetically adds oil paint and oil sticks to imbue the work with a new layer of color that sits atop the original acrylic. Gilliams’ fresco-like process looks not just at the creation of a history within a singular piece, but also at the interplay of how paint can both soak into and sit upon a surface. Gilliams plays as well with overlapping stylistic choices, rendering his fantastical narratives in an array of painting styles meant to further underscore the timeless quality of his work.
Gommaar Gilliams was born in 1982 in Lier, Belgium. He graduated in visual arts from LUCA School of Arts in Brussels and holds a Masters degree in Painting from PXL College in Hasselt. Gilliams has exhibited widely across Europe as well as in solo exhibitions at De Buck Gallery in New York and the La Brea Residency in Los Angeles.