AEROPLASTICS contemporary

Profil

AEROPLASTICS Contemporary occupies a very special place in the art gallery scene in Brussels and Belgium. Jerome Jacobs' decision at the end of 1998 to take over a large town house not far from the Stephania Square was already of itself inherently unusual. At that time there seemed to be a trend towards moving to the lower part of the city with many gallery owners setting up premises in the vast, disused warehouses along the sides of the canal - some more successfully than others. By opting for an old building in an upmarket area of the city, Jerome Jacobs was purposely drawing attention to the essentially bourgeois aspect of art collection that others were seeking to dismiss; but above all he was setting up a framework for a hitherto unexplored dialogue between often audacious works of art and rooms more designed to house academic paintings and 1900s curios than multimedia installations. Parquet flooring, red carpet, high ceilings, stucco mouldings and gilding, huge mirrors perched on mantelpieces - the décor is as far removed as one could possibly imagine from the white cube aesthetic.

Yet, paradoxically, this architecture lends itself remarkably well to exhibiting contemporary art: the highly ostentatious rooms of the first floor, the piazzo nobile, being complemented on the second floor by smaller, less ornate spaces, easy to darken and suitable for video projection. The dichotomy of this exhibition space is an excellent expression of the policy Jerome Jacobs is pursuing with Aeroplastics, where the spectacular often rubs shoulders with the intimate, just as eroticism - no matter how extreme - always contains a certain poetry or bizarre humour.

From the outset, the gallery has alternated between group and monographic exhibitions, with a preference for works that develop their own language and offer immediate visual accessibility. But these qualities must also form part of a broader aesthetic programme, the aim of which is to provoke a reaction - negative or positive - in the viewer. This reaction, as Jerome Jacobs points out, must make the viewer question what he has seen or, better still, thinks he has seen: the essential thing is that the viewer should not stop at the first emotion felt.