Lumière Fossile
Group show :
Louise Van Reeth
17.09 - 26.09 2021.
Mécénat Marie Hélène et Sébastien D'Hondt - Beersel.
Lumière Fossile
Group show :
Louise Van Reeth
17.09 - 26.09 2021.
Mécénat Marie Hélène et Sébastien D'Hondt - Beersel.
ABOUT
Louise Van Reeth is a Belgian artist born in 1988. After several years devoted to installation and painting practices characterised by a strong material presence, Louise Van Reeth is now returning more fully to painting, a medium she has practised since adolescence. This new direction was nurtured by two years of training with a Belgian painter and colourist.
Her new series, Ever Changing, emerged from a series of experiments begun in the summer of 2025.
In Ever Changing, colour is applied in successive layers, each one inhabiting a surface already charged with the traces of what came before. Variations in density, transparency and light emerge through the accumulation of these layers, while subtle marks of previous stages remain visible. The painting thus becomes a record of its own making.
This process connects with more universal questions surrounding time and transformation. We too are made up of layers: experiences accumulate, some things fade while others persist. Over time, what we experience shapes and transforms us, continually opening up the possibility of becoming something new and embracing change as a positive force.
Rather than representing a specific image or landscape, the paintings create open and immersive spaces through their all-over compositions, allowing the gaze to slow down, wander and become absorbed in colour and material.
For Louise Van Reeth, art can offer a space of openness and freedom, allowing us to experience time, perception and ourselves differently, and to experience a sense of freedom.
EXHIBITIONS
2026
Collective L'Art pour L'Accueil, Hangar, Châtelain, Brussels.
2025
20 x 26 Group show Antonio Nardone Gallery, Brussels.
Group show, WTC The Hague Gallery, The Hague.
Art The HAGUE, with WTC The Hague Gallery, Fokker Terminal The Hague.
Desforges Galerie, Geneva, Switzerland.
2024
20 x 24, group show, Galerie Nardone, Brussels.
Group show, intime, Chastres, Belgium.
2023
20 x 24, group show, Galerie Nardone, Brussels.
Solo presentation, Le Beau a Une Adresse, Brussels.
Artist Meeting group show, Knokke's Casino, Knokke Heist, Belgium.
Group show 40 Talents curatée par Antonio Nardone, Brussels.
Installation solo show, Festival des 5 saisons, curation Lieux-communs, Chaudfontaine, Belgium.
2022
Nationa(a)l Artist, group show of Belgian artists and designer, Tour et Taxis, Brussels.
Au-Delà', Exposition collective, cimetière de Namur, Lieux-Communs, Belgium.
'Terre Promise', with Aymeraude du Couëdic, Agathe Dupérou, Eglise de Xhignesse, Hamoir, Belgium.
Solo show 'Paysage Imaginaire', Fort de Saint Héribert in collaboration with Lieux-Communs, Namur.
Solo show with Macadam Gallery invites Louise Van Reeth, David Lloyd, Brussels.
2021
'Lumière Fossile', group show with Amélie Scotta, Michiko Van de Velde, Beersel, Belgium.
'Métamorphose', group show with Alessandro Filippini, Le Beau a une Adresse, Brussels.
Bily Art Walk, group show with Trong Gia Nguyen, Sahar Saadaoui, Guy Leclef, Le Beau a une Adresse, Brussels.
WLD collective, Affordable art fair, Tour & Taxis, Brussels.
2020
Balthasar, Group show, Sablon, Brussels.
2019
Nationa(a)l, Espace Vanderborght, Brussels.
COLLECTIONS
Hermant Architectes, Brussels.
Doodeheefver-Mergeai, Dubaï.
Wittmann, Knokke.
Jim Root Mii Amo Spa, Sedona, Arizona, U.S.
Bossuyt, Brussels.
Mécénat d’Hondt, Brussels.
Le Beau a une Adresse.
Wittock, Brussels.
Gevaert et Pouleau, Lasne.
Spiegel, Brussels.
Her artistic gestures are spontaneous and emotional, informed by materials like earth, marble, and pigments that capture the memory of intimate encounters with landscapes. Inspired by movements such as American Abstract Expressionism and Italian Arte Povera, as well as the textures of nature—a leaf’s veins, a stone’s patina—her work transforms these impressions into vibrant, universal symbols.
"The act of creation brings profound satisfaction, infusing spirit into matter," she says. Her works radiate energy and vibration, inviting viewers to engage with them personally, each through their own emotional lens. Like fragments of memory rendered in art, her creations achieve autonomy, encouraging contemplation and offering a shared yet deeply personal narrative to those who encounter them.
My series of monochrome paintings, Untitled, refers to the experience of wide open spaces, deserts and plains where the horizon seems infinite. These vast expanses where nothing stops the mind, where the gaze embraces a globality it recognizes, these great spaces that reassure us, inviting us to melt into them and reminding us that everything is there and that we are part of it.
The physical work evokes a dialogue between the body and the memory of an experience in the landscape. It celebrates the materiality of the work of art as an open door to an elsewhere of the sensory order, and a certain quest for freedom emancipated from the immediacy of life.
Text, Gwenaëlle de Spa, 2019.
Louise Van Reeth's installations are more about raw material than nature. Charcoal, marble, soil or gold in the form of volatile leaves make up the repertoire with which the artist works. Pure elements drawn from the landscape. Noble materials confront other, sometimes less noble, materials, complementing each other within the same space recomposed by the artist.
Indeed, it's not a question of composing by imposing a form on the material. The artist's practice is more like recomposition, "doing with". For she accords a certain respect, almost restraint, to the natural element she exploits. Since each stone has been shaped by the hazards of time, and each piece of charcoal holds in its intrinsic quality the history of the tree it once was, the aim here is to carefully select, choose or retain the key element in the composition, so that it contributes to the creation of a harmonious whole.
It is through the form of the mandala that this harmonious whole is expressed. In Buddhist tradition, the mandala is the spiritual representation of the cosmos. Its concentric circular form is a medium for the mediation of spiritual knowledge.
Taken from a psychoanalytical perspective, Jung sees the mandala as a description and symbolization of the psychic totality, whose transcendent function is driven by the living symbol and whose vehicle is the dream. Based on this approach, Louise Van Reeth's mandalas are a personal exploration of a universal theme.
In her diptychs, color plays an important role, playing with the natural materials that inhabit the work. In contrast to the inward-focusing found in mandalas, here the work tends to overflow the frame in a quest for an infinite balance between the organic and the geometric, between saturated pigment and soft, natural tones.
Slow, meticulous work echoes the gestures of artisanal practices, exalting the qualities of the mineral and the organic. Raw, just-assembled, their appearance nonetheless derives from a history to be considered over the long term. These sets are a world unto themselves. They are a pursuit of balance, a quest to capture the fleeting, suspended moment. Louise Van Reeth's desire to "make" these "material" elements exist together underlines the transitory nature of all things.
