Erik Jeor & Elvire Soyez
Residenceartists
Place: Storaateljen, BKN
Date: 17- 30 October 2020
Two artists as different as the married couple Erik Jeor and Elvire Soyez form an alloy at Galleri Benoni: Jeor’s watercolours, fleeting and fluid like air and water, with Soyez’s solid sculptures, created from fire and earth. The title L’Apesanteur contains both weight and its suspension: gravity and weightlessness (a theme that preoccupied Simone Weil). Erik Jeor’s watercolours float in a space or a submarine world, between form and formlessness, body and landscape, abstract sign and figure. Between apocalypse and bliss. Floating, swimming — yet they have arisen from the gravitational pull of the running pigment, its own physical weight.
And Elvire Soyez’s objects in fired clay, resting heavily on their base, simultaneously contain the weightless and the celestial: the ancient Armenian church surrounded by a cloud. And the crystalline mountain peak that transforms into a cultic structure, related to the sky‑storming utopias of futurism and expressionism. In the earthly, the spiritual is incarnated, as in eroticism: a cleft in the snail. The metamorphoses reveal a smile.
/ Peter Cornell, author, art critic, and honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts
