Ready to start 2020 with a bang?
Then let’s head for Brussels and the fair that now marks the beginning of every new year:
We’re back at BRAFA!
Come and find us at STAND 8C with our masterpieces, the sign of our passion and curiosity.

A vast landscape dated 1571 adds to Jacob Grimmer’ body of work: the artist is a one of the essential milestones in the history of landscape painting and the extent of his paintings, as well as their high quality, place him among the finest painters of the genre. Two elements make this large picturesque landscape particularly surprising: the character in the foreground, a good shepherd leaning on his stick and behind him, a sumptuous lordly manor.

Beneath the gaze of Charles IX painted by Clouet, we shall be presenting a Temptation of St. Anthony by Jan Brueghel the Younger: fiery colours and an unnerving bestiary lie at the heart of the subject, plunged into the half-light of a nocturnal landscape inspired by a drawing by Jan Brueghel the Elder, which is currently kept at the Kupferstichkabinett in Hamburg.

Snow covers the branches of Leytens’ trees and through the lines that converge towards a vanishing point, the composition reminds us of the painting in the Hermitage, which offers the same perspective in a grandiose manner.

Finally, David Teniers’ satirical eloquence is expressed in this delightful scene of a tooth-puller, which portrays the practitioner brandishing a tooth, and the unfortunate patient holding his bruised cheek in his hand. The so-called ‘dentist’ in the engraving by Le Bas, is facing the viewer in a regal pose dressed in fancy coloured garb. He proudly points to the result of his surgical operation! Behind him, his patient seems anything but happy about the intervention: and yet, all the precautions were taken to put him to sleep. There are various essences and solutions on the table, especially poppy pods. Clearly, these soporific plants were insufficient. The hourglass standing among the bottles is there to remind us – just like in a vanitas – that time is slipping away from us.

As for our modern selection, Gustave de Smet’s painting of a Fun fair is representative of his works from the late 1920s, a period during which he essentially executed paintings that reflected the joy and happiness of life. He returns to this theme in a sketch of Fairground stallkeepers in 1935.

With his ‘Teatrini’, Fontana offers us another type of show in the form of a mini theatre, similar to Chinese shadow play. The frame serves as the apron and accentuates the feeling of depth. Through the mental landscape Fontana creates, we manage to escape from the narrativity that accompanied the gesture to focus on the narrativity offered by the object itself, whereby its own space becomes a space within the universe’s infinity through mysterious yet figurative forms.