When the Théâtre National invited me to create what would become the visual identity of the 2023–24 season, I already wanted to work with images of crowds, of multitudes. So I went looking through the photos, all those images that are traces of the theatre’s activities, with a particular focus on the audience. This mass of people that watches but that we are not used to watching. 

I recognized a show I was lucky enough to attend. It was performed outdoors, in the street, in front of the Bourse, in the very heart of Brussels. This image embodied what I find most exciting about theatre. An eclectic crowd, people who were ‘passing by’ and who look together at something beautiful, something very simple, a dancing body. 

The scene takes place in the street – we can even see bits of scaffolding – and yet the characters are transported into a landscape that is the opposite of the space they occupy. Like an expression of the elation that theatre can bring about. 

Layers are everywhere in my visual work. I’m not afraid to show that I’m on an ongoing quest, and the layers allow me to reveal the layers of doubt. As vulnerable as a thin skin, the painting remains open, questionable. Everyone can imagine it differently, can appropriate it, make it evolve by integrating it. Passing in front of it and in so doing creating endless variations – some characters being on a human scale. 

I like this idea a lot!

— Gloria Scorier, april 2023

Gloria Scorier holds a degree in illustration from Brussels and is currently doing a master’s degree in painting at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten (KASK) in Ghent. Her work questions the boundaries between disciplines, in particular between drawing, illustration and painting. 

Her studies, first video then illustration, awakened her capacity for narration, her pleasure in telling and creating stories, and emphasized the importance of inventing new ways of thinking. That is why she looks closely at details, focuses on fragments, multiplies a piece of a photo a hundred times, and these enlarged forms end up verging on abstraction. In this way, she produces images that, in contact with each other, generate stories and shelters for thought while maintaining a sense of mystery. 

In her studio, she works simultaneously on her paintings and her notebooks in which she records sketches, notes and thoughts. She captures, photocopies, draws and collects images. The affinities between these different media enable her to reflect on the relationship between image and text. She keeps track of this process and we can therefore make out, beneath the layers of paint, tape or paper, the meanders and doubts that form the foundations of the drawing.