David Crunelle- Degenerates

Brussels-born artist David Crunelle lives and works in Turku, Finland. His practice is rooted in mixed media, centred on a highly technical, meticulous approach to collage, which he combines with acrylic paint and epoxy resin. His recent solo exhibitions include Intarsia (2019), Ordalie (2021) and Hopelessness (2023). Aware that art has never saved the world, David Crunelle devotes himself to it. At a time when we are plunging blindly into the void, he knows that his paintings are tombstones rather than parachutes. His works are a politeness of despair, an aesthetic quest that has renounced grand rhetoric and denunciations, a quest that has no use for hope. What derisory tools: scissors, glue and a jumble of paper. What an immoderate hope it is to carve our world to pieces, only to reorganise the remnants into complex assemblages laden with meaning. Between taut geometry and symbolic allusions, a reinvented beauty emerges. For beauty is part of our world, even if it will not prevail.