Adrien Tirtiaux

• 27.01.–13.03.2010

From January 27 to March 13, 2010, Galerie Martin Janda is showing the second solo show by the young Belgian artist Adrien Tirtiaux (born 1980 in Brussels). Tirtiaux grew up amidst Belgium’s comics culture and then studied architecture — two important points of reference in his work.

The title of the show, Le pouvoir de l’ellipse, alludes to Scott McCloud’s notion of closure (frz. ellipse). Tirtiaux employs it to signify the cognitive process a person reading comics performs in order to arrive at a coherent narrative. The white margin between the two comic panels, the in-between, is in fact where the action occurs, extrapolated from a “before” and an “after”.

Le pouvoir de l’ellipse constitutes an attempt to conceive the exhitbition as spatial comic: the medium’s specificity — illustrating the passage of time in two-dimensional space — is extended from the sheet of paper to the architecture of the gallery. The visitors are guided through a story in which each opus can be read as sequence: it may be viewed individually or in connection with the wider narrative, which comes about when the works are brought together as well as in the confrontation with the architectural configuration of the gallery.

“The odyssey of a lonely cowboy through the salt desert reflects my ambivalent relationship to the White Cube; the different legs of his journey are analogous to my work process.” (Adrien Tirtiaux)