THE BEIGE PIMPERNEL

Exhibition view, The Beige Pimpernel, KOMPLOT, Brussels, photography by Lola Pertsowsky

EN DIRECT / Exposition collective The Beige Pimpernel avec Rosanne Claes, Nicholas Goudket, Rik Peeters, Ignace Wouters, jusqu’au 22 décembre 2023, KOMPLOT, Bruxelles

Commissariat : Koi Persyn

“At what particular moment the strange doubt first crept into Marguerite’s mind, she could not herself afterwards have said. With the ring tightly clutched in her hand, she had run out of the room, down the stairs, and out into the garden, where, in complete seclusion, alone with the flowers, and the river and the birds, she could look again at the ring, and study that device more closely.

Stupidly, senselessly, now, sitting beneath the shade of an overhanging sycamore, she was looking at the plain gold shield, with the star-shaped little flower engraved upon it.

Bah! It was ridiculous! She was dreaming! her nerves were overwrought, and she saw signs and mysteries in the most trivial coincidences. Hasn’t everybody in town recently made a point of affecting the device of that mysterious and heroic Beige (sic) Pimpernel?”

Chapter XIX – The Beige (sic) Pimpernel, The Beige (sic) Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy, 1905

Nowhere to be found, the Beige Pimpernel always eludes from one’s sight. It is an anti-hero of true spirit, opponent of the romanticised Blue Flower and the anti-revolutionary Scarlet Pimpernel. However, lay your hands on a pale pimpernel and you’ll follow a tragi-comic, yet epic, path that might guide your gaze to the Mehrmarkt / Surplusshop, to the care centre for special needs dogs, to the top of a sky-scraping tower or to the emotioneering EDM-feast.

The time is ticking TikTok, and seven days go by faster than a week, so make sure to embark on a trail of beige flags, planted in the Grey Gardens of your braincase. In this cerebral, drowsy dreamscape, the protagonist is leaving sublime petals of blossoming souvenirs, marking the floret’s ominous come and go, hide and seek, rise and fall, laughter and tears.

“We seek it here, we seek it there,
Those yuppies (sic) seek it everywhere.
Is it in heaven?—Is it in hell?
That damned, elusive Pimpernel?”

Chapter XII – The Scrap of Paper, The Beige (sic) Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy, 1905

Text by Koi Persyn