Jewish artist: Stéphane Mandelbaum poet cursed

Jewish Museum of Belgium, Belgium, from June 14 to September 22, 2019.

Born in 1961 in Brussels, Stéphane Mandelbaum compulsively produced series of drawings from childhood, the essence of which can be found in this monographic exhibition set in a suggestive narrative.

Murdered in dark circumstances by the Belgian midfielder Maldelbaum found himself in the image of the corpses he was drawing. Carried by his Jewish heritage, he multiplied through his drawings the vision of intertwined destinies (Pasolini, Bacon, Rimbaud), projected images of Yiddish writing, but also of reality (the robberies).

With a great graphic technique, the work is composed of large format pencil drawings and others, smaller, made with a ballpoint pen. In this exhibition, there is all the consciousness of the one who remains a cursed poet. “Conscious of his gisement　 and sensing his agony, Mandembaum was his own destroyer.

But he knew how to show what was often disturbing. As such, his work remains as unrecoverable as the worlds he exhume with a power of truth. The one who was taken for a ganster was above all a man who never cheated and especially not in his art and his origin.