Paul Gees: Tension

It is a privilege for El Principal de Còrsega to present, for the first time in Barcelona and, indeed, in Spain, the work of Belgian artist Paul Gees. Curated by Veerle Wenes, founder and director of valerie_traan gallery and Gees’ representing gallerist, the exhibition also marks the first official collaboration between El Principal de Còrsega and another European apartment-gallery, in this case from Antwerp. The exhibition revolves around one of the fundamental concepts in Gees’ practice since the 1980s: tension. Hence its title, Paul Gees: Tension. More than a thematic motif, tension constitutes the structural principle that articulates his sculptural and spatial practice, and the axis from which the artist has developed a body of work of remarkable coherence, rigour and singularity. Born in Aalst in 1949 and trained as an interior architect at Sint-Lukas Brussels, Paul Gees has, since the 1970s, developed a practice situated at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and space. His early works belong to the fields of performance and installation, in dialogue with movements such as Fluxus, Arte Povera and Minimal Art. From the 1980s onwards, his research has focused on sculptures and spatial objects conceived through minimal, precise and carefully constructed interventions. In Gees’ work, tension does not operate as a metaphor, but as a material and physical reality. His works render visible concrete relationships of pressure, balance, weight, resistance, rhythm and gravity. Through predominantly horizontal and vertical structures, the artist activates a field of forces in which materials confront, support, contain or challenge one another. Wood—flexible, alive and vulnerable; stone—dense and corporeal; steel—rigid and resistant: each material appears in his work through its specific properties and its capacity to generate contained energy. The result is a body of work of great formal clarity and notable intensity, in which stability and risk coexist in a balance that is always measured, always demanding. Paul Gees’ practice stands out for its consistency and for a formal refinement that does not renounce complexity. His sculptures condense a sustained reflection on the relationship between matter, construction and space, placing the viewer in direct encounter with form, force and proportion. With this exhibition, El Principal de Còrsega reaffirms its commitment to presenting internationally relevant artistic proposals in Barcelona and to establishing curatorial collaborations capable of generating new dialogues between scenes, contexts and sensibilities. The presence of Paul Gees in our space represents not only the introduction of a key figure in contemporary Belgian sculpture into the Spanish art scene, but also the opening of a line of exchange between European galleries that share the same intellectual and exhibition standards.