Thomas Lerooy’s drawings and sculptures involve a creative game with citations and reminiscences from art history. The biting irony that is occasionally noticeable in Lerooy’s technically extremely accurately realised drawings and his sculptures arises from a clever use of highly symbolic objects such as skulls, playing card motifs or skeletons, which he combines into scenarios that often appear macabre: in Lerooy’s works, for example, roses bloom from skeletons, centaurs pose in the manner of lap dogs, and putti sporting death’s heads rather than angelic curls cavort in a kind of danse macâbre, provoking the viewer by holding him captive somewhere between attraction and revulsion. By employing a succinct formal language and confronting historical patterns with familiar symbols of transience and decay, he distorts the traditional, original meaning of a monument with its postulate of eternity and so lends it a bitter-ironic aftertaste.
The central piece in the exhibition “Something In Between” is a sculpture of two putti, quite literally ‘caught’ in a loving embrace in a glass case; Lerooy creates a dialogue between them and several drawings exposed, thus investigating the multiple layers and ambivalences of human emotions and relationships, the permanent “in between” of our position in life, and in particular the role of the artist as a ‘mediator’ who represents these emotions.