BRENT WADDEN: MAIN-À-DIEU
ALMINE RECH is pleased to present Main-à-dieu, Brent Wadden’s two solo exhibitions in Paris and Brussels.
October 18 – November 29, 2025
To weave: to cross one thread with another, to bind fragments into form, to create tension, pattern, structure. It is one of humanity’s oldest gestures — domestic, ritual, artisanal. In Brent Wadden’s hands, weaving is not only a method but a process, an artistic language. It binds past to present, solitude to community, work to trance, matter to memory.
Wadden’s practice unsettles categories. His handwoven textiles, stretched onto canvas, move between painting and craft, between the studio and the loom. The grid of warp and weft becomes a place where color and line accumulate, where small irregularities grow into structures of their own. Each work contains both order and disruption, precision and accident, repetition and deviation.
For Wadden, weaving is not only the making of cloth but the production of form — a way to push material to its limit, to discover meaning in imperfection, to let process speak as powerfully as image.
Each of Wadden’s new works is constructed from three panels. Each panel, in turn, is divided into six sections. A rigorous structure, a pared-down palette, a concentration of motif. By exhausting its limits, form becomes force. By exhausting material, a deeper necessity is revealed.
The act of weaving is daily, mechanical, repetitive — and therefore transformative. Wadden weaves alone. He builds his own frames. He shifts color gradually, knot by knot, until rhythm becomes trance. The gesture is at once humble and radical: an endless repetition echoing the punk ethos of his youth, a strict DIY ethic carried forward into art. Nothing outsourced. Nothing wasted.
It is no coincidence that the Paris exhibition bears the title 'Main-à-Dieu' — the name of the nearby fishing village — as if to anchor this return to origins already in the very name of the show.
For Wadden, weaving is not only structure but survival. He speaks of exhausting the material — using fabric until nothing remains unused, nothing is thrown away. No titles for the works; the gesture is enough. In Brussels, the exhibition ‘Best Before’ invokes the expiry dates stamped on the tins found in his father’s fishing cabin, as well as a punk album cherished in youth. Both references signal impermanence, but also persistence: what survives, what remains.
Weaving, for Wadden, is more than a technique. It is a way of inhabiting matter. A way of refusing waste. A way of binding one’s own history — childhood, punk youth, working-class origins — into the patient fabric of art.
To weave is to return. To return is to repeat. And in repetition, transformation occurs.