„Alle Kunstliebenden sind Objekte der Kunst, nicht Subjekte! Alle „Kunstliebenden“ spielen, spielen, spielen bis zur „Machtergreifung Kunst“ und dann herrscht „totales Spiel“!“

This declaration by Jonathan Meese is a manifesto for the total annexation of our society by play and he’s not wrong if he connects play with the ultimate activation of artistic expression.
What is the setting that grants us this freedom to improvise, to imagine and to remember?

It’s the philosopher’s Walter Benjamin’s Spielraum; it’s the psychoanalysts D.W. Winnicott’s Potential Space. An endroit in which play overrides the orders of experience and provides a framework for creative activation.

For Winnicott, who’s writings also influenced Moonen Guillaume’s practice, creativity is not a purely artistic phenomenon, but rather an inherent, omnipresent potential within human beings.

What to call them? Angels, cherubim, putti?

Technically, angels are the broad theological category. Cherubim are, biblically, a specific high-ranking order of angel: composite creatures with multiple wings and faces. Putti are rooted in Greco-Roman art: chubby winged infants associated especially with Eros/Cupid, used decoratively in classical art and revived by Renaissance artists in both secular and religious contexts.

My first angel painting came from a fragment of Venus, Mars and Cupid, by Piero di Cosimo, hanging in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. I zeroed in on Cupid and the rabbit beside him.