Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. - Et je l'ai trouvée amère ('I sat Beauty on my knees. - And I found her bitter'), Sacha Cambier de Montravel's first solo exhibition at the gallery in Brussels. With a singular ensemble of eleven paintings, the artist carries the viewer into a snow-covered landscape at the heart of post-industrial Flanders. The exhibition resonates with the Flemish pictorial tradition of the sixteenth century, with Brueghel the Elder as its foremost figure. The architecture of the region forms the backdrop for a wandering in which the protagonists yield to gestures that are at once sensual and destructive. Here, the wounds of the present continue this tradition: human and canine figures evoke the contemporary homosexual condition, while the frozen surfaces turn into mirrors of a world in search of meaning.
Sacha Cambier de Montravel's painting situates itself within a rich constellation of references, reminiscent of major figures such as Bosch, Brueghel, Caravaggio, Dürer, Saedeleer, Van Heil, De Vos, and Patinier. These influences are rooted as much in the artist's Belgian origins as in his dual education at the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris and La Cambre in Brussels. The choice of wood panels as medium, echoing ancient practices where art and craftsmanship converge, imparts a distinctive materiality to the work. The grain of the wood, still perceptible beneath the paint, engages with sculpted frames that suspend each scene in a space poised between past and present. This temporal dimension continues in his reinterpretations of historical works, most notably The Massacre of the Innocents-Brueghel's masterpiece-which he transposes onto the village of Esplechin, set against an architectural backdrop marked by the legacy of the coal-mining era. The monumental tree emblematic in this painting, borrowed from the Flemish painter but enlarged, seems to have survived the centuries as a silent witness to violence: from the massacres perpetrated under the Duke of Alba¹ to the persecution of homosexuals today. In the frozen puddle, the image of the Sacré Coeur emerges as an echo of the violence of the Paris Commune. By confronting distinct times and spaces, Sacha Cambier de Montravel reminds us that, despite resistance, every era gives rise to its own 'Duke of Alba': history repeats itself and, There will always be winters.
The artist thus situates his works in dialogue with history while opening a window onto contemporary torments. At the heart of this aesthetic, the question of queer desire emerges, notably through an explicit reference to chemsex. This phenomenon-at once collective pleasure and perilous terrain-becomes a metaphor for the contradictions of contemporary desire: freedom and dependence, pleasure and threat, culminating even in the pursuit of programmed self-destruction. These tensions take form in images where bodies-often concealed, ashamed, behind windows where the shadow of the Church is never far-embrace in fragile intimacy, even as outside, stray or lifeless dogs attempt to drink from a frozen puddle. If, as Judith Butler writes, 'the body is always a site of resistance to the norms that govern its materialisation,'² the painted figures give form to a painful inner struggle, verging on a poetics of destruction. On the immaculate snow, the figures surrender to intoxication; yet this deceptive whiteness conceals a menacing powder, casting the universe into disenchantment.
The exhibition's very title, j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. - Et je l'ai trouvée amère ('I sat Beauty on my knees. - And I found her bitter')-borrowed from Arthur Rimbaud³- announces this paradoxical confrontation with beauty. Hervé Guibert4 grasped this very cruelty in the midst of the AIDS crisis when he wrote in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990): 'Beauty, when it turns against you, is all the more cruel because it had saved you.' In this vein, Sacha Cambier de Montravel develops an aesthetic and political reflection, animated by a queer community that confronts dominant discourse in its negative5 dimension. This reflection takes shape as a theatre of the gaze: the gaze we cast upon those who consume themselves in destructive pleasure, conscious that no victory will be granted them. And as we watch without acting, the flames-as beautiful as they are cruel-pursue their work, consuming the pavilion amid collective indifference.
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¹ Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba (1507–1582), governor of the Spanish Netherlands (1567–1573), was one of the principal agents of Philip II’s political, religious, and moral repression.
² The American philosopher Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); French translation: Ces corps qui comptent, trans. Charlotte Nordmann (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2009).
³ The French poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose title comes from the prologue of A Season in Hell, dating from April-August 1873.
4 French writer and journalist (1955-1991).
5 According to Lee Edelman (No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 2004; French trans. L’impossible homosexuel, EPEL, 2013), queer negativity refers to a position of non-being, intolerable and subversive, which undoes identity and radically rejects normativity.
