Lebasille

Lebasille is the pseudonym of Belgian visual artist Isabelle (Antwerp, °1989). Isabelle uses snippets and scraps of the past to explore the horizons of a vintage future. Her ultimate quest? To define things from the heart. Growing up around antiques, the historicity of objects came to Isabelle naturally. She learned how to communicate with everything that surrounds us, just like other children do, but unlike most of us, she kept on doing it while growing up. It’s only later on in life she learned that sensing the depth of field of things is not considered a useful skill in our contemporary consumer society. She does not regret acquiring nor holding on to the skill of communicating with the things around us. Every day again, she listens to the stories of objects and images from the past. Isabelle cuts up these stories — both literally and figuratively speaking — and brings old and glooming historical energies back to life. Isabelle lives her art. She is slightly ashamed to admit she is as ripped apart and pieced together as the collages she creates. Being born in Belgium on the brink of the third millennium, Isabelle’s internalized visual repertoire is firmly rooted in the eclectic collective imagination of European and American pop-culture, avant-garde and fashion as it developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. Using that repertoire as a foundation, she creates novel, surreal worlds. She plays around with proportions, combines elements from vastly different contexts, makes ages clash. This way, a dialectic transformation of the original images occurs, which allows the observer to reinterpret historic elements in refreshing ways, unveiling future possibilities. Hence, her work is characterized by both a quirky patina and a futuristic feel.