arts review

Artist Hans Op de Beeck Brings his Dark Disney World to Antwerp Museum

In Nocturnal Journey, his solo exhibition at Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA), Hans Op de Beeck takes the viewer on a fictional, night-time journey balanced on a knife edge between dream and reality.

“I think it’s important that the viewer can be a companion; somebody to share a journey with. Life is full of falling down and getting back up, and I don’t have many truths to share, but I am in search of togetherness, and a positive collectivism,” Op de Beeck explained in his speech at the opening of Nocturnal Journey. Only moments before, curator Anne lien de Troij compared the artist to the impressionists who “were able to fix a moment, like a fleeting encounter so masterfully.” She goes on: “Hans Op de Beeck does something similar. He freezes extraordinary, short-lived moments in time.” And in Nocturnal Journey, these frozen moments are gathered together to lead from space to space in a continuous, fluid motion.

Instead of a classic retrospective, Op de Beeck has created a route of both new and old works for the exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The visitor is submerged in a visual and sonic landscape, a fictional, night-time world that balances between dreams and reality, suffused with quiet and melancholy.

The journey begins with Tatiana (Soap Bubble) (2017), a finely rendered sculpture of a young girl blowing bubbles. The bubble isn’t yet perfectly round, but is still ‘flubbering’ a little, almost as if the girl is still blowing it. Op de Beeck invokes the bubble as a reference to the seventeenth-century vanitas painting tradition, where it is a symbol for the fleetingness of existence.

The artist uses ideas of transience to tell something about the human condition and the phases that we pass through between life and death. In Vanitas XL (2021), Op de Beeck repurposes numerous classical vanitas objects, like a skull and fruit. But he greatly enlarges them, thereby putting the viewer into an Alice in Wonderland encounter: the viewer shrinks and becomes lost in a colourless painting. For Lewis Carroll, these changes stood for the magnitude of Alice’s confusion and uncertainty in the bizarre world of Wonderland; for Op de Beeck, the viewer literally relates to the symbolism of transience and our strange existence.

Melancholy with a dark edge

Op de Beeck’s choice of a palette of greys, which creates the sense that his works are covered in a layer of dust or ash, is a conscious tactic to bind the present with the past: the monochrome functions as a bridge between periods and styles. If a particular time betrays itself in the form of a yellowed blouse or a Hi Vis jacket, then the grey glues these anachronisms together. It also serves to keep the show as a whole from resembling a wax statue museum. Like the grisailles from the fifteenth- to eighteenth-century painting, through which artists used shades of grey to create a sense of depth and relief, so Op de Beeck’s work creates the impression of stonemasonry.

Rather than imitating reality, Op de Beeck aims to tease out feelings. He creates a dream world in which lost moments are underlined by grey silences. In Op de Beeck’s universe, where no clock ticks, the quiet is broken only by the viewer.

Op de Beeck interprets night-time as a “nothingness-space” in which places and events hold a different, absurd or mysterious charge. He compares it to driving on an empty motorway, or working in his studio while the rest of the world has been asleep for hours. Night-time brings with it a certain atmosphere in which the mundane becomes strange. In Nocturnal Journey, he explores this intuition, considering emotional shades of loneliness and introspection. His sculpture Dancer (2019), for example, depicts a Brazilian dancer smoking a cigarette, out of boredom or tiredness, as she briefly escapes the demands of everyday life between the factories around her. For a while, she isn’t a performer, but just a person withdrawing into an unguarded intimacy without a façade.

Many of Op de Beeck’s works present desolate scenes like these, in which melancholy sometimes acquires a dark edge. The effect is related to catharsis: art as a source of consolation, as a means by which to work through emotions. To convey this experience as continuously as possible, Op de Beeck chose to dispose of the white noise of the classic exhibition entirely: in Nachtreis, visitors will find no titles or lists of materials accompanying the work. It is up to the viewer to find a connection to what is presented in this nighttime scene.

Everyday emptiness

Hans Op de Beeck distinguished himself early on with video art, a medium through which he quickly gained recognition. In Coffee (1999), we see a man and a woman drinking coffee without talking or looking at each other. Long, static shots with little or repetitive action emphasise slowness and resignation. Other early works, like Situation I (2000), also speak to a fascination with quotidian, detached emptiness and the melancholy of deserted or monotone spaces.

Op de Beeck wanted to explore these themes in physical spaces, too. In this way, sculpture and installation came to accompany his video work in a seamless fashion. The installation Exercising the Nowhere (1) (2000) is a minimalistic representation of a ticket office in a desolate train station. Through the windows of the miniature, the viewer sees a motorway at night – even then, Op de Beeck was already concerned with the unreal qualities of space.

Op de Beeck’s earlier work bathes in the same atmosphere as his newer creations: it evokes desolation. Occasionally, this scrapes up against something uncomfortable. In the video Blender (1999), the viewer is presented with an empty fairground carousel. As the speed of its rotations increases, the horses and buggies are blurred to a single, fuzzy, spinning image. The quicker the movement, the less intelligible and more disorienting the forms become. Here at KMSKA, Blender is a premonition of Dance Macabre (2021), a life-sized carousel engaged in grim shadow play, with skeletons in Belle-Époque dress and a ray.

The loneliness of the masses

Over twenty-five years, Hand Op de Beeck has reflected on our ever-increasingly complex life-world and universal questions of meaning and mortality. Originally, he focused in particular on social alienation, with works that addressed the anonymous, pre-programmed environment of modern society. His stylistic reconstructions and videos of motorway restaurants, petrol stations and deserted town squares show a world made lonelier by automation and mass production.

Gradually, his focus shifted to more existential themes, in which the human search for meaning and transience is centred. In Nocturnal Journey he translates these reflections into a mysterious, nocturnal park with a diverse cast of characters that, like children of Disney and Pompeii, combine wonder, fear, and stillness. This tension is highlighted in particular in, for example, The Boatman (2020), in which a figure in a rowing boat is presented as a Charon-like person, the mythical boatman of the Styx, mediating between life and death;. However, the provisions he has with him suggest that he is not returning home soon, or that he is returning home with the shopping. Op de Beeck’s sculpture calls to mind images of refugees in transit, lost, or searching for a home.

Op de Beeck’s multidisciplinary bent is underlined by works like The Settlement (Indoor) (2016), in which miniature stilt houses stand in real water, their windows illuminated by electric light. Sound, too, plays an important role in Nachtreis: the exhibition is accompanied by soundscapes by sound designer Greg Scheirlinckx and composer Sam Vloemans. The music disappears and re-emerges when you enter new spaces, giving the exhibition a filmic structure.

The nocturnal journey ends with the video Staging Silence (3) (2019), in which miniature worlds are constantly (re)constructed. It sums up Hans Op de Beeck’s practice beautifully: the human as a player in an endlessly changing decor, in which the border between what is real and what is not is constantly shifted.

Nocturnal Journey runs until and including 17 August at KMSKA in Antwerp. The eponymous exhibition catalogue is available from Hannibal.

• antwerp
• Hans Op de Beeck
• kmska
• sculpture