(Not) All Is Gold

From Fri. 5 Sep. 2025

To Tue. 28 Jan. 2025

(Not) All Is Gold investigates the notion of value in art, whether it be at a direct and intrinsic level or a metaphorical one. Alongside works that embrace/subvert the very nature of their constitutive elements, others subtly comment on the economy of the art world and, more specifically, on the status of the artists and their strategies to survive. A special focus will also be made on works that integrate transactional mechanisms into their own creative process.

Curated by Emmanuel Lambion, Bn PROJECTS in dialogue with Frédéric de Goldschmidt.

The exhibition is built around a selection of works from the collection of Frédéric de Goldschmidt, while also making room for invited contributions (16 / 52), which have led to new additions to the collection, specific commissions, or works on loan or owned by the artists or the curator.

In addition to the selection of works by 52 artists in the main exhibition, three additional and subsequent articulations will unfold in the co-working spaces: as part of the MAD parcours, in November 2025 (with Jofroi Amaral, Deborah Bowmann, Eléonore Joulin, Valentin Souquet) in December 2025 on the occasion of the fourth edition of BXMAS-ART, and in February 2026, in the context of the PhotoBrussels Festival.

Developing a project for and with a collection is always a specific exercise as collections often reflect a mediated, indirect reflection of taste and sensibility, and of a personality that creates and gradually articulates its discourse through the evolving development of the collecting adventure. Sub specie, I have always appreciated the character of Frederic de Goldschmidt’s collection, coherent, eclectic (in the etymological sense of the word, from greek eklegein = to choose), as well as the direct support he often offers to emerging artists, working in close dialogue with them, helping to produce new works, even when that doesn’t necessarily mean acquiring them right away. In the ideal cases, the discourses elaborated through the process of collecting write themselves beyond the influence of the market and galleries, without denying or sidestepping though those realities of the art world. Frédéric de Goldschmidt is, of course, deeply familiar with the mechanisms of the market and the subtle puzzle of interactions and opportunities, sometimes random, that lead to the valuation of a work of art. Even if, unlike Midas, not everything he touches turns to gold, he is fully aware of the role that he, like other key players in the art world, can play in the recognition and valuation of an artist’s path. In this sense, it seemed to me that Cloud Seven, and the interaction with Frédéric’s collection, could offer the ideal context for developing an exhibition project which I had been carrying with me for some time — (NOT) ALL IS GOLD. Subverting the trans-idiomatic expression in English (but also in French, Italian, etc.) saying that “all that gliters is not gold,” the title suggests, conversely, that everything might be or become so. Overall, the exhibition questions the notion of value and value creation in art, whether intrinsic or metaphorical, subverted or arbitrary, quantitative or qualitative. Several thematic threads emerged clearly in the selection of works: Alongside works that embrace or subvert the precious/poor nature of their constitutive materials, other creations subtly comment on the ultra-liberal economic world, and more specifically, on the art market economy and on the status of artists, as well as the strategies artists employ to ensure their survival. A particular attention has also been given to works that integrate transactional reflection and mechanisms into their creative process, often by involving the collector or patron directly. Finally, a specific articulation explores the notion of otium liberale (liberal leisure), as a way to resist economic diktats.

Works from Frédéric de Goldschmidt’s collection and invited artists: Ignasi Aballí, Jacques André, Elena Bajo, Béatrice Balcou, Eva Barto, Thomas Bernardet, Alighiero Boetti, Kasper Bosmans, Aline Bouvy, Jérémie Boyard, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Marc Buchy, Carlos Bunga, Julian Charrière, Magnus Frederik Clausen, Vaast Colson, David de Tscharner, Daniel Dezeuze, Nico Dockx, Jürgen Drescher, Laurent Dupont, Teresa Estapé, Cristina Garrido, Filip Gilissen, Valérian Goalec, Fernanda Gomes, Ferenc Gróf, Wade Guyton, Jan Henderikse, Ana Jotta, Ermias Kifleyesus, Gabriel Kuri, Pierre Leguillon, Tom Lowe, Karine Marenne, Céline Mathieu, Diego Miguel Mirabella, Jonathan Monk, and others.

The Ground Floor combines a series of works that illustrate in an organic sequence the different areas of investigation of the show. Highlights, all pushing and challenging common assumptions and perspectives, are lithographs by Wade Guyton printed over a 1928 Manet exhibition catalogue from the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin (which included a painting acquired by Frédéric de Goldschmidt’s grandmother and whose sale served as foundation for his collection of contemporary art), Jacques André’s unemployment stamp canvases commenting on the artist’s precarious status, Marc Buchy’s speculative labor contracts, Teresa Estapé’s diamond stripped of commercial worth and Giovanni Morbin’s performance documentation asserting idleness as political resistance.

Displayed on a small shelf, Cristina Garrido’s Unholy Alliance: ARTFORUM (February 2012) shows the spine of the art magazine, and behind it, two compacted papier-mâché balls: one small, made from editorial pages; the other, significantly larger, from the advertising sections. A wall display shows the five spirit levels placed by Laurence Vauthier during her performance Added Value, commissioned and acquired by Frédéric de Goldschmidt. The final price of the work was based on how long the artist maintained the b...

alance of those five spirit levels, one by one, as long as possible at arm’s length. A nearby vitrine contains various protocol- based works that visitors can explore at their own pace. Among them is a restaurant receipt by Jonathan Monk, discreetly adorned with a small hand-drawn motif. For several years now, the British artist has been posting these receipts adorned with a drawing in the style of a famous artist (here Isa Genzken) on Instagram, and randomly selling them to one of his followers who “liked” the image, at the nominal value shown on the receipt. In a sense, it’s as if the artist’s everyday expenses are directly funded by his global digital audience, but not without evoking the urban legend of Picasso paying restaurant bills by sketching on a napkin. A letter from Julian Charrière to Frédéric de Goldschmidt documents that the carbon extracted from CO₂ exhaled by Frédéric and 999 other participants into a balloon was used to fabricate a synthetic diamond which was then submerged under the Arctic ice sheet. This poetic act implies a kind of karmic reciprocity, symbolically returning carbon to the Earth in response to the extractive economy that so acutely threatens our climate balance. Beside it, we encounter a series of three abstract paintings signed “Clausen”. In recent years, Clausen has launched a number of delegated conceptual painting projects. These include the Clock Paintings and, more recently, the Found Paintings, in which the artist asked an assistant to abstractly overpaint canvases he found at the flea market. In this case, three figurative canvases by “forgotten” painters Robert Biagioli, Anne-Marie Guyader, and Robert Patier, were chosen as the base layer for these new works, to be overpainted as abstract compositions at the request of Magnus Frederik Clausen. The protocol devised by the artist stipulates that the works are now jointly owned by five new “co-owners” of the three paintings: Terry Rocvès, the custodian of the estates, Frédéric de Goldschmidt , as commissioner, Emmanuel Lambion, Magnus Frederik Clausen, and Anskar Baer, his German assistant who executed the new abstract layers. Each of the five shares is transferable, but the artwork as a whole will always remain the indivisible property of the five co-holders.

The S1 brings together works that primarily articulate their critical dimension with regard to the notion of valorization of the work through its very materiality, whether via its technique, support, or processual history. The first work encountered on the stair landing is a highly minimal and historic piece: Châssis avec film plastique transparent (1968) by Daniel Dezeuze, one of the founding members of the Supports/Surfaces movement. Taken literally, it represents a kind of zero degree of painting, and the piece subtly echoes Ignasi Aballí’s work on the ground floor.

The material most commonly associated with financial value, paper currency, becomes the raw, denatured material of Shredded Value, a work by the Dutch artist Jan Henderikse, which here takes on the appearance of a quasi-vegetal carpet. Egon Van Herreweghe’s contribution, drawn from his Grand Cru series, takes the form of a box for a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, 1976, a choice that is, of course, far from incidental. Inside, in place of the bottle, is a photographic print of it developed on unfixed baryta paper. In other words, should the fortunate owner of this grand cru facsimile decide to open the box to better enjoy it, the paper would blacken and the print would self-erase. Technically speakin...

g, the work’s device reproduces the dialectic and dilemma experienced by holders of great wines: to enjoy them is to accept their disappearance, a mise en abyme of the paradox of possession. Apparently Empty (Time), 1995–2025, by the Catalan artist Ignasi Aballí, is a magnified version of Pintura Abandonada. The pictorial valence of this immense canvas, over two meters high and left to itself in the artist’s studio, has sedimented somewhat randomly over a period of thirty years, thanks to the dust that settled on it over time. What is usually a degrading agent that one tries to protect paintings from becomes here the unintentional creative agent of the work and its value. Not far from there, we have juxtaposed two very different works that implicitly engage the notion of diverting or leveraging the intrinsic value of the support as part of the artistic intervention. In the work of Pieter Vermeersch, it is the veins and texture of precious raw material, in this case marble, that structure the pictorial potential of the piece. Vermeersch limits himself to four or five highly minimal pictorial accents that echo and exalt the natural tones of the stone. The gesture is just as simple, though more uniform and using a resolutely more modest material — cardboard — in the work of Carlos Bunga. In both cases, the simplicity of the painterly act, combined with the highlighting or subversion of the intrinsic value of the support, raises the question of the added value brought by the artist’s intervention. And in both cases, these are artists with a well-established and recognized presence in the art market. Béatrice Balcou’s practice is rooted in a meditation on our relationship to time, to the conscious and focused exercise of seeing, to contemplation, slowness, and the idea of caring for works of art. This was evident from the outset of her career through her Ceremonies, carefully choreographed and orchestrated performances in which Béatrice, with unwavering focus and precision, would remove a work of art from its conservation packaging, gradually revealing it to the viewers’ gaze, and then, just as slowly, making it disappear again.

This invitation to slowness acts also as an exhortation, a metaphysical awareness of the cycles of life, of nature, of civilization, and a memento of our shared condition as beings, objects, or artifacts, all ultimately destined for decay, disappearance, and forgetting. This quasi-curatorial artistic practice applies particularly to Recent Painting, which we present here. At its core, it is a page from a damaged catalogue altered by water and time devoted to the American painter Agnes Martin. This reproduction was collectively restored by the artist in collaboration with students from the restoration department of La Cambre. In doing so, the reproduction becomes an original work in a way, that is created through a process of co-authorship, thereby acquiring the specific valorization of a unique artwork. Its detailed caption informs the viewer about the material history of the piece, foregrounding the collective chain of creation and thus the intrinsic value augmentation at the heart of all acts of creation.

On S2 the focus shifts to works that directly engage with the economy of the art world, transactional protocols, and the status/economy of artists themselves. On the landing, a very simple and effective neon by Jérémie Boyard.. Its angular and sketchy outlines are directly taken from a graphic that highlighted discount prices in a supermarket leaflet, cut in half and empty. Originally conceived for an exhibition in Greece, Debt Is Only a Promise (2016) by French artist Matthieu Saladin has been updated for the occasion in Belgium’s three national languages. Each of the three stamping presses features the eponymous phrase in one of these languages, denouncing an economic system that is largely based on the involuted financing of national debt. In front, Gabriel Kuri’s Untitled (Symmetry of Choice) acts in this context as subtle comment on his own economy, a recurrent feature of his body of work, and on the polyfunctional character of Cloud Seven: a notice board is defunctionalised serving as letters are replaced by small salt and pepper packets, collected by the artist over his professional travels. Sophie Nys presents a photograph of the Tour du Midi, an emblematic tower housing the Federal Pension Administration. The photograph (a Polaroïd taken from...

the artist’s studio) was acquired by Frédéric for a sum equivalent to the artist’s projected pension under current forecasts. Further along, Oriol Vilanova’s Economic Poem presents a vertical sequence of numbers from 50 down to 25, set against a grey background. These amounts (in euros) represent a real-time trace of a negotiation the artist conducted while purchasing a block of postcards during one of his daily visits to the flea market. Nearby, a new work by Tom Lowe features a hyperrealist painting of a Louis Vuitton bag, beside which the actual bag lies casually placed. In a manner reminiscent of Georges Perec, the British painter enjoys setting challenges that define constraints that play with the both the exhibition space and the execution techniques of his paintings. Often, his execution is directly shaped by the parameters of display and reception. In this case, reflecting on one of the decisive elements of his own personal economy beyond painting, namely, the purchase of secondhand clothing for resale on platforms like Vinted — Lowe decided to buy garments, paint them, and adapt the painting technique to match the inevitable image compression on a screen. Depending on the size of the canvas, he allows himself greater or lesser painterly freedom. These are the paintings he offers for sale on V…d at prices comparable to those of the objects depicted. A further constraint is brought about by the fact that he adapts his technique (and thus the scale of the representation) to ensure that the work’s final selling price roughly equals a standard wage of manual labour for the matching production time.