Jacques Charlier is a leading contemporary artist who has occupied a unique place in the Belgian art world since the late 1960s. Entirely self-taught, he started to compulsively collect books on contemporary and modern art and artist biographies at around the age of fifteen. Even in the early 1960s, he was deeply knowledgeable about contemporaneous international art movements, such as American Pop Art and French nouveau réalisme. He responded ironically to these developments with an atypical visual language, one that was borrowed, in part, from the movements themselves. Charlier’s work is extremely diverse and not infrequently humorous with an activist slant. It is rooted in the liberation logic of the 1960s and 1970s and, in addition to paintings and photographs, his oeuvre includes (protest) songs, poetry, magazines and even a ‘Centre for Detoxified Art’. Charlier never actually talks about an ‘oeuvre’ and prefers to discuss his work in terms of ‘activities’. The word underscores the diverse and revolutionary nature of his work.
Charlier showed unmodified flea market finds with his own photographs in his earliest exhibitions. He was employed as a technical draftsman by the Service Technique de la Province de Liège (S.T.P.) from 1957 to 1977. During this period, he and his colleague, André Bertrand, created ‘documentary’ photos and objects to illustrate their time at the organisation. Charlier saw the photographs and workplace relics as a reaction to Pop Art and nouveau réalisme. They were presented as ‘real’ artworks, often on light boxes or arranged in grids, with the latter configuration being a playful allusion to the seriality that was typical of the said movements. At the time, Charlier also made multiple paintings of banal objects, which he ‘painted’ with permanent black markers instead of oils as a way of mocking the weighty elitism of painting.
In 1970, Charlier met the older Marcel Broodthaers, who introduced him to well-known Belgian galleries, including Fernand Spillemaeckers’ newly founded MTL. Charlier exhibited the S.T.P. photo series at the latter gallery. Influenced by Broodthaers, a ‘conceptual’ Belgian heir to Surrealism, Charlier craftily adapted American avant-garde art – principally minimalism and conceptualism – to the Belgian identity. He became synonymous with the resulting stylistic eclecticism, which he used as a strategy to beat the ‘enemy’ – the mainstream art movements – with his ‘weapons’. Charlier likes to describe himself as a ‘wholesaler of Belgian humour of all categories’.
In the early 1980s, relative to his other ‘activities’, the artist turned more towards painting. Once again, he offered satirical responses to the prevailing artistic trends. During the same period, with his band Terril, he critiqued the latest sensations in the music world from a musician’s standpoint. He caricatured genres from post-punk to electronic music. In the second half of the 1980s, Charlier began to increasingly focus on institutional art criticism. He playfully anti-dated his paintings, aged them using fake craquelure effects and mounted them in heavy, antique frames. In so doing, he challenged the idea of ‘modern(istic) painting’. Art criticism, too, did not escape Charlier’s disruptive tendencies. Under various pseudonyms, he wrote fake art reviews, taking aim at the typical, bourgeois-sounding professional jargon.
Even today, Charlier’s ‘activities’ continue to resist any form of stylistic uniformity. He constantly shifts between painting, and other techniques and mediums. With his démarches [actions], he repeatedly sows confusion. On his erratic course, Charlier constantly reinterprets contemporary artistic expressions. As a result, he is still regarded as the artist of institutional criticism who wittily questions the art world through distorted representations.
