PREES RELEASE COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE PERSBERICHT		THE EXHIBITION
	FLESH & BLOOD in association with Aeroplastics Contemporary In November 1998 the Damasquine Gallery (established by Jerome Jacobs and Bernard Prevot in 1992) opened a new space for contemporary art, Aeroplastics Contemporary, in a large 19th-century townhouse in Brussels. Aeroplastics is an exceptionally eclectic place where group and thematic exhibitions alternate with installations and video. The common thread is the encouragement of work that has an immediate visual accessibility and promotes a language of its own. But the purely aesthetic is in itself not enough, even if the search for a certain beauty and visual immediacy is indispensable and unignorable. As a consequence, Aeroplastics pursues this sort of beauty, simple and unsettling, reductive and discrete, surprising and aggressive, which arouses a reaction in the public. Whether it is positive or negative, the essential thing is that the viewer does not stop at the emotion of the moment. The reaction should prompt a questioning of what one has seen or what one believes one has seen. It is at the very least remarkable that with this strategy they are trying to represent a view of humanity that one hardly comes across in everyday life. It is true that Aeroplastics is a gallery, but the commercial aspect is secondary to its emphasis on asking socio-cultural questions regarding the basic principles of art and its mechanisms. At Aeroplastics one encounters the most diverse artists, all of whom approach the excesses of “human expression’ in a certain ironic way: sex and crossover by Annie Sprinkle, humour and the grotesque by Jacques Charlier and Lisa Roet, violence and terrorism by Gregory Green, mutation and the limitations of the body by Robert Gligorov, Skip Arnold and Margi Geerlinks, the down sides of the consumer society by Daniele Buetti and Dana Wyse, and human stereotypes by Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroeck. The artists at Aeroplastics play with illusion, may be classical or, on the contrary, emphatically multidisciplinary. To the latter category belong the film-maker and king of trash, John Waters, the performance artist and ex-porno actress Annie Sprinkle, the style terrorists Viktor & Rolf, the multimedia activist and architect Françoise Schein and the seducer/call-girl Karen Oldenburg. But at the same time the gallery retains more normal links with a sort of painting and expression that is more accessible to a broader public, that is if it can in any way be part of an approach to constructive eclecticism: the tree sculptures by Nathalie Joiris, the geometric abstract paintings of Georges Meurant and Michel Carrade,and the illuminated electric apparitions by Martin Richman. All these can be found in the Psychedelia exhibition. Aeroplastics, in association with the White Hall, presents an exhibition that examines the boundaries of corporality.