Gallery Hioco Delany is delighted to present the first gallery exhibition of Romanian artist Raul Lile, titled HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN. For the occasion, the walls are covered in approximately one hundred works on cotton canvas, showcasing obscure and equivocal portraits.
Raul Lile is a recent graduate from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.The young artist grew up in Austria and Romania but moved to Belgium to study Film at RITCS in Brussels. After successfully graduating, he enrolled for a master’s degree in Printmaking and Drawing.
Lile’s approach to fine art and film is similar. In both disciplines he explores (lost) memories and molds them into new stories. The young artist credits ‘Eleven Sons’ by the author Franz Kafka as one of his main
inspirations; a short story about a father describing his sons. The monologue displays feelings of hate and love that can reside within close relationships. For an installation at Art Safari in Bucharest, the artist created eleven portraits for each son based on the sentiments surrounding the characters in the book. The works unleashed an obsession for exploring the human condition and the fickle feelings towards interpersonal relations.
With HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN, Raul Lile examines his own social circles and the forgotten memories that surround them. A great part of this new body of work is made in Romania, where Lile reconnected with his relatives. Navigating himself anew in this estranged environment and reigniting lost relations, imbued the artist with a plethora of emotions and a sense of alienation. ‘Within my relatives I discovered a balance of characteristics I love and hate. I was continuously confronted with my own DNA’, he explains. For the artist, the works presented in this exhibition are representative of that feeling.
The title of the exhibition, HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN, refers to a song by the English rock band The
Animals. The title of the song refers to a 19th century brothel in New Orleans. The bordello can be seen as an addictive setting where men become caricatures of their own emotions. Especially the opening lyrics play into Lile’s vision for the exhibition, evoking a sense of reflection and descriptiveness towards one’s environment.
Most portraits seen on the walls enjoy a monochromatic palette of blacks and grays. Color ever so scarcely seeps through. However, the artist states that he needs a reason to use abundant colors. Next to acrylic paint, Raul Lile mostly used inks and liquid watercolour, which truly comes to life on paper. The feelings the artist paints with are translated in the expressiveness of the materials.
Text by Jens Roothoofd
