What connects Arctic glaciers, remote islands adrift at sea, and bodies concealed in vibrant collages? The certainty of imminent disappearance—and perhaps the hope of resurrection. Curated by Lisa Bruyneel, former iconographer at the Paris Opera and founder of the creative hub La Fabrique des Regards, Dans tes brumes invites visitors into a timeless realm where nine Belgian artists converge: Dirk Braeckman, Julie Calbert, Katrien de Blauwer, Antoine de Winter, Renee Lorie, Stéphanie Roland, Dries Segers, Lore Stessel, and Laure Winants. “It’s a rich dialogue, where images unfold in myriad ways,” says Charlotte Boudon, Artistic Director of Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire. “From chromatic abstraction to figurative works, from prints on marble to postcards printed on thermal paper.”
Lisa Bruyneel weaves this diversity together with poetry—a thread that greets visitors from the moment they step inside. “This is an exhibition about the energy of a city, about erasure and forgetting, about emergence and the unexpected,” she explains. Adding depth to the visual experience, a rich literary corpus—featuring Denis Diderot, Maya Angelou, and W.G. Sebald—infuses the works with further resonance.
As a playful nod to her past as an iconographer, Bruyneel has also curated a playlist to guide visitors along the staircase that links the gallery’s ground floor to the first floor. This subtle sonic backdrop underscores the exhibition’s exploration of the many nuances of appearance and disappearance.
A metaphorical mist
The exhibition’s title invites interpretation in the broadest sense. This mist—concealing and revealing, prompting reflections on loss and, at times, our own vanishing—is omnipresent. For Katrien de Blauwer and Lore Stessel, it takes on a metaphorical, even playful form. De Blauwer’s collages craft an emotional iconography, where fragmented bodies merge seamlessly into the layers of material overlaid on them. Stessel, meanwhile, stages performances with dancer-subjects, painting their silhouettes with photosensitive emulsion. The result is a textured interplay of thick layers and vacant spaces, where her backdrops are either erased or overloaded.
For Dries Segers, photography is first and foremost “writing with light.” In Hits of Sunshine, he captures a setting sun as it obliterates the negative, producing cosmic, almost abstract visions of a radiant star adrift in a bluish haze. This journey into the uncanny resonates in Dirk Braeckman’s work as well. Drawing from archival materials, Braeckman prints on aluminum in a process he describes as “appropriation”—“the removal of an image from its original context to make it his own,” he explains. Against a dark gray backdrop, teeming with swarming black forms, a luminous swirl emerges, evoking a blaze—a mystery left for the viewer to unravel.
Our blindness
The works on display also evoke other mists—ones that serve as a reality check: the urgency of climate change. “It’s a reflection that is undeniably present in many artistic practices today,” notes Charlotte Boudon. Stéphanie Roland, for instance, conjures “ghost islands” that appear and disappear on postcards, responding to the warmth of our hands. On the reverse side, the postcards reveal the coordinates of these territories and the date of their potential submersion, as predicted by scientists.
Formerly a doctor, Antoine de Winter has transformed into an “archaeologist of the present,” capturing images of tarpaulins draped over glaciers in an effort to slow their melting. These peculiar shrouds, imbued with a melancholic beauty, are presented as glass prints. “The title of the series, Blindfolded, takes on a cruel resonance: what is shrouded here is our blindness,” Bruyneel explains.
In the Arctic, Laure Winants created Time Capsule, her large-format color charts. “When we drill into the ice there, we study the air bubbles trapped within, unlocking the history of past climates,” she says. By playing with the prism of light, Winants highlights the “history of time”: “Because time creates light, and light reveals itself through color. The light spectra you see are anchored in a specific moment in time.”
Blending storytelling, scientific inquiry, and technical experimentation, Laure Winants’s work embodies Lise Bruyneel’s vision. “Dans tes brumes offers a fresh perspective on visual creation and exhibition scenography,” says Winants. “It reveals multiple layers, multiple levels of interpretation.” She concludes: “It’s an experiment brought to life by a curator whose humanity and collaborative spirit I deeply admire.”
“Dans tes brumes” is on view until February 22, 2025, at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris.
