Toile d’araignée

Nicolas Party's exhibition, "Toile d’araignée" [spider web], at Xavier Hufkens St-Georges, Brussels, presents five distinct groups of works. The exhibition is structured as a sequence of rooms, exploring visual and thematic correspondences. Early works are pastels based on Georges Rodenbach's "Bruges-la-Morte," focusing on water and bridges as motifs of reflection and transition. These pieces engage with themes of doubling, repetition, and identity, drawing connections to Symbolist literature and films like "Vertigo."

The exhibition also features a double portrait, exploring blurred boundaries between life and afterlife, memory and reality, and unstable identity. A series of "dead fish" works reference Dutch still life painting and artists like Goya and Renoir, presenting the subject in indeterminate settings. Further works depict spider webs at daybreak, symbolizing transition and ephemerality, and treescapes with a focus on sky and restrained visual language, articulating an investigation into states of transition and the instability of the image.