Banks Violette Solo Banks Violette exhibition at BPS22 in Charleroi, Belgium

From February to May 2024, US artist Banks Violette is occupying all the BPS22 galleries with a major exhibition marking the grand return of this (former) enfant terrible of the contemporary art world. Some forty historical works, including monumental installations, rub shoulders with his new creations recently produced in collaboration with the well-known fashion house Celine.

The artwork of Banks Violette displays great coherence. He essentially creates all his pieces from metal, mirrors, salt-covered objects, black screens and white, fluorescent tubes. The artist employs a constant aesthetic contrast between black and white and this contrast finds a particular resonance in the thirty or so exhibited works: between noise and silence, presence and absence, gothic romanticism and minimalism.

Behind the highly formal aspects of the work can be glimpsed the darkest sides of American society. Because, instead of reaching for an objective representation of the facts, the artist conjures up the imagery inherent in American popular culture and contemporary sub-cultures to create novel aesthetic experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent than with metal culture (heavy metal, death metal, doom, drone, etc.), where he rescues its aesthetic potential and reproduces it on a personal scale in several large installations exhibited in the glare and gloom of the BPS22.

The works of Banks Violette that occupy the entire museum emerge as the new dark and anguished expression of a radical social critique.