Dismantling

Sean Landers’s exhibition “Dismantling” at Rodolphe Janssen Brussels features works that investigate the artist’s position and identity through a sustained interrogation of their own construction. Working primarily in paint, Landers employs a unique visual language and representational systems to explore the role and depiction of the artist, often using distinct visual metaphors.

The exhibition includes paintings of animals, such as bears, birds, and bunnies, situated within sparse pastoral environments. These renderings evoke the stylistic qualities of early nineteenth-century Animalier art, but the animals often confront viewers with a direct gaze. Inscribed into these landscapes are the artist’s diaristic writings, which express converse ideas of doubt and ambition inherent to artistic practice. These texts, integrated into the environments, function as a philosophical commentary, with Landers using these motifs as proxies to explore the limits of hubris and fallacy, and to dismantle private doubt into public spectacle.