Extended until May 24.
With Carried by the land, Gallery Hioco Delany presents new work by Belgian artist Diego Boonen.
Boonen’s practice is rooted in a sense of longing for silence, for space, for a world that eludes our own, and perhaps never fully existed. His paintings are not landscapes in the traditional sense, but evocations: traces of places that feel at once familiar and out of reach. They carry a pastoral atmosphere that resists precise definition, yet remains immediately recognisable.
Where earlier works centred on solitary figures rendered in a dreamlike visual language, Carried by the land extends this trajectory broader in scale, quieter in tone, and more deeply immersed in nature. Riders, figures, eagles and bison move through his compositions, rarely turning toward the viewer. This creates a subtle distance: their presence suggests narratives unfolding beyond our field of vision. The resulting tension lends the work a cinematic quality, as if each painting were a fragment of a larger, unseen whole. His figures seem to exist outside of time.
For this exhibition, Boonen draws on the landscapes of Yellowstone: snow-covered pine forests, ice-blue nights, rugged mountain ranges and autumnal scenes ablaze with saturated reds and oranges. These images resonate with the Hudson River School, where the American wilderness was rendered as sublime, untameable and spiritually charged. Where nineteenth-century painters often approached the landscape with meticulous precision, Boonen adopts a more intuitive and imaginative approach. His paintings are not records of reality, but inner constructions in which perception, memory and imagination converge.
As a self-taught artist, Boonen positions himself outside conventional academic frameworks. This vantage point opens up a wide and intuitive field of influence. His work resonates with artists such as Gauguin, Rousseau and Bonnard in its use of saturated colour and simplified form, while also echoing the radical directness of Picasso’s early work. At the same time, contemporary painters such as Danny Fox and Tal R find a parallel in his pursuit of an unfiltered, almost childlike visual language.
Colour functions as a central, structuring force within his practice. Deep, saturated hues collide with soft pastels, shaping the emotional register of each work. Here, colour is not merely descriptive but expressive: a pink sky becomes a mood, a terracotta mountain range a sensation. Figure and environment begin to merge, gradually dissolving the boundaries between human, animal and landscape.
Boonen works with oil paint, pastels and pigments on canvas and paper, often at a large scale. This scale is integral, physically drawing the viewer into the work and intensifying the sense of immersion. His paintings hover between control and release: dense, impasto surfaces sit alongside more open, tentative passages. Layers of paint are built up and, at times, broken open again, like geological layers that retain traces of their own formation. Drips run downward, marking gestures that remain unresolved. Areas of exposed canvas do not read as absence, but as moments of breath within the composition.
With Carried by the land, Boonen presents a world that resists singular interpretation. Figures dissolve into their surroundings, animals fade into fields of colour, and landscapes unfold as mental spaces. There is nowhere you need to be.
Text by Isabel Van Bos
