Hans Op de Beeck

This review is featured in Almine Rech Magazine #39

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Welsh poet and playwright Dylan Thomas lamented against the dying of the light when he insisted, “Do not go gentle into that good night,”¹ a powerful plea against succumbing to death, whilst the influential Hungarian French photographer and sculptor Brassaï saw the darkness as an enabler of our deeper selves. Seeing so much of Paris by night, he explained his preoccupation:

“Night does not show things, it suggests them [...] it disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by reason during daylight.”²

Frightening and fantastic, it is this surrendering to the day’s end that lies at the heart of Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s work. His exhibition ‘Nocturnal Journeys’ at KMSKA in Antwerp has successfully turned its daytime interiors of old and modern Masters into a dream-induced playground. Where everything is likely to fade to nothing in the blink of an eye. If the exhibition prior to Op de Beeck’s, that of painter James Ensor, introduced the everyday as unsettling and even surreal, then here he recalls so many of Ensor’s themes, in an amusement park of his imagination. Thirty-nine monochromatic sculptures of humans, animals, and carefully selected objects, appear like theatrical props, choreographed along a winding path shaped as much by memory as imagination.

Van Gogh too saw the day tranquilized by the night, writing how he often thought “that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.”³ If the monochrome of Op de Beeck’s work is deserving of a richer palette, then the longer the darkness holds the more believable it becomes. If the world beyond the walls of the museum is sometimes ceaseless, it is the exhibition’s silence that becomes its reward, providing a kind of spiritual footing for the walkthrough. With Op de Beeck’s nocturnes of a girl with a beautifully plated pigtail in over-sized shoes and tutu, Zhai-Liza (mother’s shoes) (2024), Maurice (2024), of a boisterous boy with a collar, buckled shoes, and play sword, troubled angel with her wand and set of wings, Zhai-Liza (angel) (2024), and permanently bubble-blowing Tatiana (soap bubble) (2017), all, as with everything in the exhibition, are coated in a subdued grey that far from evoking decay or death, offers a bewitching beauty of life after the lights have gone out. Like anything in our past, memories and events, they come back to us in black and white, and Op de Beeck’s singular color carries that same sentiment of retrieving from reality its details, as the visual architecture of the exhibition. The surfaces of his sculptures appear petrified as if coated in dust. The internal becoming external, intimacy and childlike fantasy on display.

In The Settlement (2016), one of the largest and most significant works for Op de Beeck, he recreates a ramshackle village that appears to teeter on the edge of collapse into the skin of water below. A living landscape that appears to have been abandoned, for reasons we aren’t entirely aware of, like so much of the displacements that ravish the present world. What we are given, upon entering ‘Nocturnal Journeys,’ is an all-encompassing environment, where the exhibition creates its own atmosphere. Truly unique for the artist’s vision of inviting us to sleepwalk through a series of darkened rooms that offer a whole host of virginal characters with their eyelids closed, appearing to meditate whilst upright or resting. As Op de Beeck’s figures hold firm, elements from everyday life create these individual islands, that take his audience from one sleep-induced scenario through the dream doors of another.

With every step we encounter another phantasmic scene, taking us deeper into the exhibition, and further into the mind of the artist, in which his choice of materials is as much ephemeral as it is physical. Silence and space shape what we see and how we experience it, as he sees the stillness as facilitating the mindful and meditative, whilst space, a carriage, corridor or even a corner of a room are cast as poignant relics from reality, as we wander through this grey graveyard of detached dreams and dormant desires. Yet the stillness, far from empty, detaches the exhibition from reality, pregnant with emotion and charged with the presence of the human spirit. Works like Danse Macabre (2021), Vanitas XL (2021), The Boatman (2020), and the signature work The Horseman from the same year, appear like illusionary landscapes that fill our field of vision, and if ever our dreams were epic, then these are the scenes deserving of our attention. Appearing like a series of still lifes, the most obvious is Vanitas XL, where Op de Beeck resurrects the language of the still life on a monumental scale, in which a human skull, fruit, a flute, an open book, and a glass take on an unsettling scale that doesn’t wrestle with death, so much as invite life back in when everyone has awoken. The reward of the exhibition is profound, of a rare kind of seeing that begins where daylight ends.

¹ Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1953), 128.
² Annick Lionel-Marie, Brassaï: The Monograph (Boston: Bulfinch, 2000), 157.
³ Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh (N° 676), Arles, September 8, 1888.