GILLES BRENTA THE IMPOSSIBLE
September 6, 2017
To Christine
Gilles Brenta was born on November 29, 1943, in Uccle, Belgium. His father wanted to orient him toward a diplomatic career. He preferred to paint, draw, and fled the university to frequent the studio of painter Maurice Boel. He passed the entrance exam to the very selective École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, where he met his future wife, Christine Wendelen, in 1967. It was a period of learning where he was furious, where he invented everything, where he did not read. The first writer to interest him would be, later, Witold Gombrowicz. He wrote a little, poems, published some, was an actor at the Living Theater, in Brussels and Amsterdam, and in some films, began to exhibit and worked as a set designer for theater and cinema.
At La Cambre he became friends with an architecture student, Yves Bossut, a painter and childhood friend of Tom Gutt, the leader, since the late 1950s, of the small group of young people engaged in a violent surrealism, a surrealism of combat. In 1973, he exhibited at the Aquarius gallery. His painting is one of the most disconcerting and least aestheticizing that we know. Gutt buys several paintings from him. This is the beginning of their friendship.
Gutt admires above all Paul Nougé, the man who writes to André Breton, as early as 1929: "I would quite like those among us whose name is beginning to mark a little, to erase it." Of "Belgian surrealism," Nougé is the absolute reference, the one who first proclaims the importance of Magritte, refusing to see in him only a simple "painter," therefore ceases to be interested in him when he is caught up by the art market: the worst of betrayals. Gutt is deeply friends with some of Nougé and Magritte's old companions, Louis Scutenaire, Irène Hamoir and Marcel Mariën and makes them meet Gilles. He is 30 when he meets these "great figures," becomes their friend, participates in their enterprises, their publications, the same journals, Phantomas, Les lèvres nues, Le Vocatif... The history of surrealism in Belgium is that of a succession of encounters, a continuous thread. The "lesson" of Nougé — and before him, already, that of Jacques Vaché: "We neither love Art nor artists" — passes through Scutenaire, Mariën, Gutt, up to Brenta, who never considered himself nor will consider himself as a "painter" or "artist." "One sees him above all not painting," admires Gutt who, from 1976, exhibits him at the Galerie La Marée, in Brussels. "Booby-trap paintings," remarks Irène Hamoir. He works in series, sometimes at long intervals, never making concessions, always in total freedom. Unlike Magritte, for whom titles are determining, he systematically refuses to give any to his works, to preserve them from any attempt at interpretation. Tom and Claudine Jamagne Gutt, Louis Scutenaire and Irène Hamoir, Marcel Mariën, Jean Wallenborn, Michel Thyrion, André Thirion, Gaston Puel and Bernard Noël preface his exhibitions. Gilles illustrates their books, and sometimes publishes them, under the imprint, created with Christine Wendelen, of Les Trois petits cochons.
Poet, collagist, painter, draftsman, sculptor AND blacksmith, mason, carpenter, wood turner, Gilles Brenta knows how to do everything. He works more and more as a set designer, for advertising and television — Télé-Chat, with Roland Topor and Henri Xhonneux, 234 episodes between 1983 and 1985. He produces and directs documentaries, Le Jeu des figures, on Denis Marion, Le défilé des toiles, on "pompier" painters (with Claude François) and in 2001 (with Dominique Lohlée), L'ami fantastique, three days with Noël Arnaud, the film where he goes furthest, which will become a true cult film. Arnaud had exhibited at his place, in Pen du Tarn, the very impressive paintings of the series L'Étendue des Dégâts. Their complicity is strong. They make several books together.
In 1993, Christine and he discovered on the heights of Aveyron a small hamlet of stonecutters and sheep breeders, L'Hôpital. He could have said, like André Breton in the dazzlement of Saint-Cirq-La-Popie: "I have ceased to desire myself elsewhere." They decide to leave Brussels and live there. They spend years rehabilitating and beautifying it. The extent of the work — L'Hôpital comprises seven buildings left abandoned — constitutes a challenge to his measure. It becomes over the years an amazing place where it is good to live, with its "Town Hall," a "municipal bathroom," a house named after each of his two children, Julie and Loup, an "André Breton Festival Hall," a "Louis Scutenaire Square," a "Dada Street," an "Irène Hamoir Fountain," a "Tanguy Park" and many books. The old stable is transformed into the "Bar du lendemain" (in reference to Ribemont-Dessaignes' novel). Tom Gutt, Christine and Gilles publish a journal there, l'Écho du Var et de l'Aveyron réunis, "daily of art and poetry not appearing on Sundays," 373 issues from 1997 to 2002.
He paints from time to time, invents objects. His choice to live apart keeps him away from artistic news, which he hardly cares about, but his works are regularly shown in anthological exhibitions on Belgian surrealism. In 2008 Roger Roques, the animator of the bookstore-gallery Loin-de-l'œil, in Gaillac, allows him to achieve better than a hanging: the installation of a Petit Musée Brenta which brings together his paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, films, and publications. What might have seemed heterogeneous shows its coherence. In 2015 the same gallery exhibits his Sabotages: the wooden clog of peasants becomes the character of a saga in 32 episodes and transforms according to his imagination into an airplane, a boat, a windmill, a dance slipper, a violin, a Trojan horse, a dinosaur, a gladiator emerging from a Chirico painting to live fabulous and jubilant adventures. A tour de force.
Illness does not allow him to continue working. He dies on July 21, 2017.
He was a member of the Association des amis de Benjamin Péret. Like his Belgian friends often, he placed Péret very high, higher than Breton. He had much in common with him: revolt, love of poetry, constant imagination, apparent roughness, generosity, fidelity in friendship. In 1925, Pierre Naville had paid a beautiful tribute^1^ to the one who was, for his close ones, "Benjamin the impossible":
"Péret, for his part, did not collect tributes, marks of deference or cries of admiration. He did not breathe promises; rather an already unbreakable meteor; Breton had immediately invited me to see in him something quite other than a writer in search of an audience; rather a being who wanted to settle accounts without delay; without concern for his person. He had indeed, rather than all others, the sense of the unforeseen, of attack, of the objective, of the obstacle to overcome [...] In these years where stupidity and vulgarity seem to have the upper hand over poets, one counts the men whose destiny hides something other than an honorable career..."
That such words can, it seems to me, apply thus to Gilles Brenta, gives a high idea of the man incapable of the slightest compromise, absolutely upright and magnificently free whom we salute with respect and admiration.
^1^ Published by Philippe Soupault in La Revue Européenne, reprinted in his book of memoirs, le Temps du surréel and in preface to volume 2 of Péret's Complete Works.