On view unitl March 29.
Deep down the rabbit hole, Noa Verborgh's first solo show at Gallery Hioco Delany brings together twelve oil paintings and two sculptures, all drawn from her fascination with the irrational. Baba Yaga, the Voynich manuscript, folk tales, superstitions, these are the kind of stories we reach for when reality needs softening, when we want a different lens or a temporary exit. Verborghís paintings dig into what makes these narratives unsettling: the instant when something familiar suddenly isn't..
Her subjects look straightforward enough. A tree with round leaves. Plant forms. A house glowing in the dark. A bird mid-song. The imagery seemed to be borrowed from picture books and fables, the kind of stories children learn to trust. But Verborgh's color choices shred that sense of safety. Hot magentas smash into sickly greens. Turquoise bleeds against deep crimson. These aren't comforting colors, they're too sharp, too charged. They belong to screens in dark rooms, neon signs, hazard tape.
What emerges is a world that registers as both safe and dangerous at once. Mark Fisher would recognize this as the eerie, not outright fear, but something stranger: the feeling that what should be there isn't, or that what is there shouldn't be. A too-perfect tree. A house lit with no one home. A bird singing in silence. These scenes feel occupied and empty simultaneously, as if the logic holding them steady just walked off-screen.
Verborgh amplifies this through how she frames things. Her images often swell to fill the entire canvas, boxing in what might otherwise feel benign. It's a move borrowed from animation and video games, those aggressive close-ups that shove you right up against something before youíre ready. Like Alice dropping through the rabbit hole into a world where the rules have changed, these paintings operate on their own terms. Flowers can wound. Trees exist because they were dreamed, not grown. Light doesn't clarify, it thickens the shadows.
Deep down the rabbit hole holds these contradictions in tension: the draw of fantasy and escapist stories that make the world easier to bear, set against the discomfort of staying in them too long. These aren't paintings you escape into, they're more like doorways you can't quite move through. They pull you in but keep you off-balance. They won't settle into a single reading. Not decoration, not critique. Not illustration, not warning. What they offer instead is a kind of charged ambivalence. Youíre drawn in, but you're not soothed.
Text by Isabel Van Bos
