HYPNAGOGIA

Timothée de Brouwer develops a painterly practice rooted in a gestural, spontaneous, and intensely colorful approach. He unfolds a vocabulary of recurring motifs frogs, water lilies, horizons used as starting points for endless formal explorations. These elements, obsessively repeated, become the building blocks of a visual language of his own, where variation takes precedence over faithful representation.

Color occupies a central place in his work: conceived as both a constructive and sensory force, it is applied in vibrant flat tones or translucent layers, generating subtle dialogues between surface, rhythm, and composition.

His work is conceived as a space of free experimentation, where the spontaneity of gesture meets the rigor of visual choices. Blending multiple references to art history, popular culture, and nature with a resolutely contemporary aesthetic, his practice offers images where lightness and density, immediacy and depth, coexist.

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Dona’ Gillon is a Belgian artist, born in Sao Paulo in 1978, who lives and works in Brussels.

Her childhood was spent in Spain and these happy memories still inspire her creative process today.

At the Ecole Supérieure des Arts de l’image Le 75, Dona’ Gillon was lucky enough to share a studio with painter Boris Semenoff. The exchanges and experimentation that happened in that studio, inform, until today, the quest of her relationship to space and how to transcribe her emotions into this space.

Throughout her career, Dona’ Gillon has advocated a playful, intuitive approach to her works, which, in fact , conceals more subtle and profound themes. Through the use of colour and her spatio-temporal relationship with the surface, she introduces us to a dreamlike universe on the border between abstraction and figuration, between the visible and the invisible.

By stacking layers, several levels of reading are offered to us: in the materiality and in the symbolism that surrounds it. Sometimes it’s the material itself that covers up or conceals the previous subject.

For Dona’, the question of volume is particularly important because it contains space and time. By freeing herself from the classical codes of perspective, she reinvents an airy atmosphere, a world anchored at the crossroads of space and time, which can be seen as an ideal world, both imperfect and protective.

Her early experimentation with automatic writing, also called psychography, has evolved into a complex language of lived experiences that can be described as narrative and compulsive, while navigating between a celestial and spiritual universe. The expanses depicted, flood the space of reality and thus become individual to each viewer, embedding themselves into each person’s consciousness.

Her work is an invitation to take one’s time, to travel and to let one’s emotions rise to the surface. Between dream and reality, contemplating her work, we discover that painting is also poetry.

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Using the visual vocabulary of a globalized landscape, Diego Herman explores notions of ownership, habitat, and otherness in his paintings. Through the depiction of familiar industrial elements from urban and suburban territories, he creates environments that are both recognizable and alienating.

Fascinated by the significance of limits and boundaries in how we conceive space, he has focused on the motif of the fence a powerful symbol of obstruction to the free movement of bodies. Despite the absence of human figures, Diego Herman composes sociopolitical landscapes. His paintings raise awareness of contemporary issues related to displacement, identity, and humanity.

By painting his recurring motifs fences and borders, abandoned spaces, and wild animals in an unnatural color palette, his works transcend the everyday and become a reflection of our society.

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Capturing the in-between and the space where myth and reality converge, where angels fall and demons rise. 

Haolin Huang bring to life transformative beings who oscillate between vulnerability and reclaimed power. They create visual tales, contexts where characters evolve like fragments of dreams: they struggle, yet remain the heroes and heroines of their own evolution. 

As a storyteller, Haolin's work explores human duality through symbolic objects, timeless faces, and bodies in motion which tell the stories of hybrid temporality, where one can get lost between yesterday and today.

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Through the painting medium, I work on the contemporary landscape. I ask myself why a simple rectangle can be so visually appealing. The collage postcards of american painter Ellsworth Kelly fascinate me. Or, closer to me, the works of belgian artist Mégane Likin. I am looking for my own solution to break the traditional “window painting”. I alternate between small and very large scale formats, exploring its contrast and dynamic. As for my process, my paintings are transformed, scratched and re-worked, like walls in the city, or like medieval palimpsests. I always combine different techniques together, like oil, lacquer, spray paint, plaster, cement. In a figurative-abstract style close to the “bad painting” artists (americans or belgian, like Walter Swennen), the result is deliberately expressionist.

I play with a certain sense of theatricality.
The themes I explore are deceptive. In the sense that, at first glance, you notice the works are almost pretty, pittoresque, playful landscapes. But very quickly you can see that something is not right. You end up noticing a neon military drone, black shadows, or some splashy confusion, weird nonsensical stains. I use my art to exorcise my fear of chaos. I try to play with the disruptive

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In her work, Mathilde van Nuffel uses a saturated color palette and a naïve painting style to create a playful and ironic treatment of her subject. The paintings incorporate elliptical texts, producing an ambiguous and intimate dialogue that disrupts the reading, offering viewers the tools to transcend the work’s content.

Through a diaristic aesthetic, Mathilde observes and expresses details that are often overlooked or taken for granted, recontextualizing them to suggest a new awareness. Painting becomes a tool to emphasize the gap between what is lived and what the mind replays.

“Originally trained as a photographer, Mathilde only turned to painting after a trip to New York in her twenties. Centered around a gallery of characters that strangely resemble us (Is it me? Is it you? Is it us?), her canvases infused with refreshing colors (perhaps the fruit of her many travels) are rooted in everyday life. Fragments of desires and moments, the artist’s works reflect our own questions and gently stir both our little and greater anxieties. A profound yet lighthearted body of work that carried us away.”
Marie Honnay

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This exhibition challenges us to rethink the ways in which we are connected, both to each other and to the larger systems that govern our existence. How can we anchor ourselves in a world that is constantly shifting, and what role do we wish to play in this vast terrain?
Artist Bio
Isabelle Woodhouse b. 1986, Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Brussels.


Isabelle Woodhouse is an Australian/Belgian artist whose practice bridges visual art and music to explore the intersection of inner and outer landscapes.A graduate of Chelsea College of Art UAL (MFA, 2014), Woodhouse’s work is a visceral, immediate response to the world around her. Her drawings and compositions serve as a vantage point to examine emotions, thoughts, and the social constructs that shape our understanding of space and identity.

Through her evocative use of form, texture, and sound, Woodhouse’s practice invites the viewer into a realm where the sensory and the symbolic converge, offering a profound connection to both internal and external worlds.

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Working on the interrogation of a precious substance - time.

Drawing lines, over and over again, until a pen runs out.
 A search for an answer to the vertigo of emptiness / of our time:
 a space where time doesn’t need to be “useful” to be precious.
 The artist works in a meditative manner while questioning one of life’s fundamental meanings.
 In this way, the “self” enters a kind of automatism; the hand runs and dances without any anticipation or conscious thought tied to the gesture itself.
 Where, then, is the boundary between dream and reality?
 Two worlds subtly connected through thoughts, beings, and actions in themselves.

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