'A Taste of Art' - EXPO - 'Michaël Borremans'

Michaël Borremans – A confrontation at the Zoo

A visit at Museum Voorlinden (30 November 2024 - 23 March 2025)

Stepping into Voorlinden for Michaël Borremans' "A Confrontation at the Zoo" earlier this year felt like entering a quiet storm of precision and absurdity. Nearly fifty paintings spanning two decades of his work were arranged like poetic fragments. Some unsettling, others elegant, strangely theatrical. Borremans' mastery of old techniques collided with contemporary unease, it inviting me to reflect on his work.

Museum brochures help visitors connect more deeply with an artist's work by offering context, interpretation, and visual cues. It often includes background on the artist's life, key themes, and stylistic choices, making complex or abstract works more accessible. This was the case for this exhibition, and I took the opportunity to provide myself with a copy (in Dutch)… A brochure helps guiding viewers through the exhibition, encouraging reflection and helping them notice patterns or meanings they might otherwise miss. It can enhance the visitor experience, although not all see the benefit of it as sometimes the content is difficult to grasp and the reading might also interfere with the visual and other experiences viewers might encounter. Although meant as self-guided tools for those who prefer or are open to explore at their own pace, they usually extend the impact of the exhibition beyond the museum walls. In my case, I used it not only during my visit for comprehension, but went deeper into the content later on too.

I often wonder who writes these brochures. Is it the artist him- or herself or is it the museum's PR-team behind the scenes? Probably it is a combination of both, where they try to find mutual outcomes and reach consensus. As I was reading through the descriptive text of the different hall topics of this exposition (Detachment, Repetition, Wanderings, Rebellion, Unpainted Canvases, Still life, Portraits), I noticed that the words used in the description somehow reflected the insights I have been trying to explain for some time now. It thus parallelled the 'Artistic Reflection Framework' in some way… I needed to go into it with more depth.

Analysing the brochure text

For each hall, I meticulously took out the descriptive words that were used, these were the specific words that I encountered: intuition, psychotic tendencies, compulsive, memory, humour, emotional resonance, meaning, deliberate, mortality, death, impulse, alienation, symbolism, tight, composition, fear, ambitions, fearless, guts, disappointment, surprising, confidential, materialistic, strangeness, mystery, compel, uninhibited, loose, instability, ritual, laughter, repress, flashback, experience, repetition, misconception, rejection, refuge, hunger, ruthless, guilt, atonement, feminine, lived, dreaming, softness, funny, remorse, generous, story, embarrassment, interpretation, calm, allusion, form(less), focus, analytic, learned, whimsical, unpredictable, clumsy, tension, manners, promiscuous, primate, careless, sadistic, impulses, desires, inhibited, uncomfortable, heavenly, allegory, dullness, monotony, tragedy, theatre, dry, influence, daydreaming, aesthetic, contrast, self-control, punchline, sobriety, rationality, act, thematic, thoughtful, opposition, precision, sexual, body bag, revolutionary, special, worthy, care, pitfall, explore, mammal, awkward, tame, charisma, existence, cool, comical, wink, metaphor, ironic, deeper meaning, heavy to bear, struggle, laugh, twist, associate, functional, inconspicuous, logical, tangible, objective, programmed, medium, ill-fitting, fleeting, useless, temporality, opposite, elusive, vanity, failure, strength, absurd, profound, tradition, expectations, sincerity, refined, superstition, inspiration, relationship, memorable, expression, objects, resist, elements, organic, belong, clue-seeking, exact, time, productive, anecdote, neutral, climax, dignified, lost, distant, anonymous, lose, perfected, wild, unimaginable, deception, slender, inaccessible, effortless, truth, life, confrontation, destabilizing, control, nuance, unmoved, expression, heroic, role, character, absent, inner, memories, reserved, build, format, equal, industrial, feature, versatile, detail, technical, controlled, fade, context, artificial, investigate…

These turned out to be most descriptive and obvious to choose wordings, and I could already see that the writers, consciously or un-consciously, have applied a balanced representation of some kind. 

I translated the distribution into the art matrix (Brain × Phase). All terms were represented exactly once and placed according to its dominant art-psychological function (Primal = bodily/instinctive, Emotional = mood/affect, Rational = meaning/interpretation) and phase (Open, Change, Close).

Placing the descriptive words under the art thinking matrix

Artistic Reflection Matrix — Open · Change · Close (horizontal) × Primitive · Emotional · Rational (vertical)

Reflection on the outcome …

It somehow remains a subjective interpretation and arbitrary of where which words fit best, but there seems to be a representation in all categories of the matrix quadrants of some kind. In any case, I would not have expected that they would have appeared so consistently. The analysis (using CoPilot) not only indicated some kind of distribution, it also stressed that the matrix thinking, as it was originally constructed, deviated from this applied version.

AI mentioned that the former way of reflection which resides under a 'psychological-neuromarketing' based approach does not completely match the artistical-based thinking. It literally mentioned: "To place the 'Borremans words' into the marketing matrix, we need to reinterpret them from their original art‑psychological context (ambiguous, emotional, reflective) into a marketing‑psychological framework that operates with three brain systems (Primal, Emotional, Rational) and three experience phases (Open, Change, Close). The marketing matrix focuses on behaviour steering, recognition, and conversion, whereas Borremans' words often operate through friction, estrangement, and reflection. … ". It thus interestingly puts question marks on the suggested approach and, in this case, goes from FIT to FRICTION …. it also emphasized the ambiguity of several words included in the analysis.

In this way, it helps reinterpreting the reflection framework and is of substantial added value, as it forces me to rethink and potentially adapt and/or improve. Models are never perfect … there is always room for improvement.

New questions emerge …

Having examined this more closely, I do have a few follow-up questions …

• Did the artist look at his work in this way, meaning: was his work created deliberately starting from these perspectives or is it a (re)interpretation (by others) of what he created? I often wonder if, as creation is often intuitively …

• Was there a communication strategy behind this exposition 'on purpose', or did it occur naturally? Did it create added value in some way?

• Would it help other artists to look into these artistic reflection dimensions, whether it is to spark their own creativity in an holistic way, discover alternative ways of igniting (subliminal) acceptance and/or improving their communication strategies?

Just some food for thought ..

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'The Art Of Mind' - An Artistic Reflection Framework

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