Chloé Coomans and elparoJuly–August 2023

Chloé Coomans and elparo spent a month on an artist residency at MACAM.

Their stay ended with an exhibition of their work at the centre.

The exhibition was entitled « regards croisés » (crossed gazes). The artistic practice of this couple of artists from Belgium is indeed characterised by works made in situ.
In situ, to affirm their commitment to creating works integrated into their surroundings.

On the one hand, they take the site’s natural and built environment into account when placing their works; on the other, they use materials gathered on site, usually natural or salvaged.

True to form, elparo created a monumental sculpture that he integrated into the reinforced-concrete structure of the abandoned lime works on the site.
He used branches gathered around the centre, which he dipped in chalk (found in the factory) to make them a brilliant white. They were set upright, like a flame, inside a vertical cylindrical concrete framework five metres high. He surrounded the whole with paving stones, also salvaged on site, to create a circular platform on the ground, as if to anchor and underline the sculpture.

As for Chloé Coomans, she exhibited her work in a room adjoining the sculpture museum, also paying tribute in her own way to the features of the site. She used natural materials such as tree branches, stones, bulbs, dried flowers and charcoal.
In this room she presented two sculptures, a series of drawings and a video.

The first sculpture is a cairn of natural stones in which dried flower bulbs from around the museum, tinted white, are planted.
The second is a sculpture made of a bundle of five branches forming a cone, at the centre of which lies a cairn of stones planted with white-tinted flower bulbs and ringed with black charcoal. She thus creates a contrast between different textures, materials and colours.
Elsewhere, she showed a dozen pencil drawings of plants from around the museum.
As she explains, these three works are meant as a tribute to the flowers of Lebanon.

Finally, a video projected onto a wall of the room traces the making of her sculptures and of elparo’s, and recalls the workshop she led at the Institut français in Jounieh with children from the area.

For Chloé Coomans as for elparo, creating works is above all an opportunity to pay tribute to the site in which they are placed, using materials that are mostly salvaged and barely processed – an affirmation of their concern for preserving nature, energy and the environment.

Serge Séroff