Hypervigilance 1/6, acrylic on unstretched canvas and canvas thread, 55 x 40 cm, 2025
Hypervigilance 1/6, detail
Hypervigilance, exhibition view, Galerie Patinoire Royale Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium, 8 May - 28 July 2025
Hypervigilance, exhibition view, Galerie Patinoire Royale Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium, 8 May - 28 July 2025
Other Togethers, acrylic under and on canvas, 200 x 150 cm, 2024.
Hypervigilance 2/6, acrylic under canvas, 55 x 40 cm, 2025.
Hypervigilance 3/6, acrylic on unstretched canvas and canvas thread, 55 x 40 cm, 2025
Hypervigilance 1/6, detail
Hypervigilance 7/6, acrylic on commercially primed and stretched canvas, 55 x 40 cm, 2025.
Hypervigilance 7/6, detail
Hypervigilance, exhibition view, Galerie Patinoire Royale Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium, 8 May - 28 July 2025
Wanderer X, acrylic under canvas and canvas thread, 160 x 120 x 2,5 cm, 2025.
Hypervigilance, exhibition view, Galerie Patinoire Royale Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium, 8 May - 28 July 2025
Combining a conceptual and expressive approach to painting, Hannah De Corte engages with the pictorial surface
on its own terms, exploring its inherent parameters. She works with canvas as her iconological partner, treating
the support of painting as her medium. Working at once with and against the material, she engages with, explores,
and pushes its properties into abstraction and metaphor.
In Hypervigilance, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, many works are presented in reverse —
the vulnerable underside of the canvas is revealed. At times, De Corte even removes the stretchers from her
paintings, which maintain their shape through the semi-solid quality that the paint brings to the cotton canvas.
Using multiple layers, the acrylic bleeds through the fabric, creating graphic abstractions, almost reminiscent of
a Rorschach test. Colorful threads retrieved from the painting itself replace the staples that once attached the
canvas to the wooden workframe. These delicate, brightly colored strings close the edges of the canvas around
the now-absent stretcher. The works are supple and soft, holding lightly within their form the imprinted memory
of the rigid rectangle of the stretcher. The edges have come loose.
Emotionally, hypervigilance is a survival state of constant alertness. The nervous system is trained and strained,
constantly scanning and ready to react. It is as if the boundary between the self and the outside world has
been ruptured, and, like these bleeding canvases, the self is hyperpermeable: receptive to the point of fraying.
Hyperfocused, each detail is heightened and charged.
Building on her earlier work engaging with the knots of the cloth as individual surfaces for pointillist expressions
of color, De Corte works here with the process colors cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, referencing the hues used
to translate digital screen images into physical prints. Here, she explores the art historical links between highly
individual pointillist and impressionist brushstrokes and our contemporary visual vernacular.
Untitled, ink on plain weave linen over herringbone linen, 55 x 40 cm, 2024.
Woman at a Window I, acrylic under and ink on canvas, 160 x 120 cm, 2024.
Donald Olson, varnish over acrylic under canvas, 18 x 13 cm, 2024.
Untitled, acrylic and ink under cotton canvas, 24 x 18 cm, 2023.
Hypervigilance 5/6, acrylic on unstretched canvas and canvas thread, 55 x 40 cm, 2025
Hypervigilance 5/6, detail
Untitled, gesso under Belgian linen, 40 x 55 cm, 2024.
Hypervigilance, exhibition view, Galerie Patinoire Royale Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium, 8 May - 28 July 2025
Self-Play, acrylic under and ink on canvas, 180 x 245 cm, 2025.
Un dimanche, ink on American cotton duck, 55 x 40 cm, 2024.
Untitled, gesso under Belgian linen, 2024.
Untitled (Outsiders), acrylic on canvas shoes, 48, 2025. João Freitas Collection.