BAD MANNERS

In general terms, the idea of making art to propose and produce new realities should clash with the belief that art’s final aim is to simply “get by”, with no grand scheme in mind. And yet, in Bad Manners—Carole Vanderlinden’s first monograph gathering over 190 paintings and notebooks—the artist’s pictorial oeuvre seems to keep both of these conceptual streams alive, both at the same time.

In the book, the artist's poetic ambiguity undermines premeditation and dismantles any stylistic language, leaving the work open to the unpredictability of making. As such, her practice responds to the flowing nature of existence, where every piece should be seen as a new day, each stubbornly seeking autonomy, refusing to rely on the outside world, or even the oeuvre itself.

At the same time, for Vanderlinden, painting is a tool for approaching reality in all its multitude of sensations, memories, and complicated human relationships. And whether her pictorial worlds are real or not, they exist to interrogate reality without any prescriptive narrative. Furthermore, in Bad Manners, the artist pushes this dichotomy between production and structure by publishing her personal notebooks, bringing their backstage role to the forefront as the conscious activity behind the unconscious output of her paintings.

And finally, thanks to texts by writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, curators Ann Hoste, Hans den Hartog Jager, and Ory Dessau, and conversations with musician Joélle Léandre, what the book establishes – if anything should be established in Vanderlinden’s work – is that there could never be a fixed endpoint in sight. Instead, what we should aspire to is a place for ongoing experimentation, for questioning, and for endless attempts “to get by.”