“j’étais air, space vide, temps”: Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s solo show

(Brussels, Belgium)

Until November 20, 2021, Mendes Wood DM will hold Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s solo show j’étais air, space vide, temps. 

Read below part of the text Bernardo José de Souza wrote about the exhibition:

“In this early 20th century townhouse in the Sablon, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané showcases some of his findings, inventions and interventions; structures that he has been devising as an artist who ventures into digressions towards inner and outer worlds, as well as into field trips across rainy forests and urban jungles, ultimately reaching the woods of human imagination. […]

This is a story of ghosts, but also a story of animal creatures, organic formations and natural matter: a reverse pareidolia that deceives visual accuracy; a sci-fi infused, abstract trickster’s tale weaving the threads of art and nature. One may well see this exhibition as an invitation to delve into a cabinet of curiosities displaced in time, or perhaps as time-travelling in search of the elemental force, that hidden entity operating its own magic within so-called reality, far beyond the horizon of visibility and below the surface of recognition, reaching wide, going back and forth in history, before and after human existence.

Here, nature is recreated in thought processes derived from its own constructs and abstractions, which in time immemorial have forged a world made of living and inanimate things, biotic and abiotic, moving in tandem to conjure some sort of universal design. And yet, a plethora of questions never cease to arise: What is natural, imaginary, emulated or simply artificial? What are the boundaries between the intertwined agents that concur to produce reality?”