about Lebasille
Lebasille is the pseudonym of Belgian visual artist Isabelle (Antwerp, °1989). Isabelle uses snippets and scraps of the past to explore the horizons of a vintage future. Her ultimate quest? To define things from the heart.
Isabelle grew up in old, eloquently squeaking houses. Her grandmother founded and ran antique store J. Zeberg for more than half a century. As a child, Isabelle would pick up the stories from the cultural artifacts that travelled through the tender hands of her grandmother, a person who cultivated an enormous respect for traditions and passed this on to her children and grandchildren.
Isabelle lives her art. She is slightly ashamed to admit she is as ripped apart and pieced together as the collages she creates. Being born in Belgium on the brink of the third millennium, Isabelle’s internalized visual repertoire is firmly rooted in the eclectic collective imagination of European and American pop-culture, avant-garde and fashion as it developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Using that repertoire as a foundation, she creates novel, surreal worlds. She plays around with proportions, combines elements from vastly different contexts, makes ages clash. This way, a dialectic transformation of the original images occurs, which allows the observer to reinterpret historic elements in refreshing ways, unveiling future possibilities. Hence, her work is characterized by both a quirky patina and a futuristic feel.