Opening Saterday Septmeber 5, between 2pm and 7pm.
With his exhibition Kosmos at Gallery Hioco Delany, painter Thomas Thoelen draws direct inspiration from the novel of the same name by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz. In this 1965 masterpiece, a seemingly innocent detail, a dead sparrow, hung from a wire, gradually spirals into an obsessive search for hidden patterns and meaning. That tension between chance and a longing for coherence is the starting point from which Thoelen develops his own visual language.
What draws him to the book is the small, enclosed space in which the story unfolds, a micro-cosmos that barely ventures beyond a single room. His paintings seem plucked from the different rooms of one and the same dollhouse: mental spaces that together form a single claustrophobic universe, where a figure at a window or at a table with a cup of coffee seems calm and familiar at first glance, but beneath which a quiet unease always lingers - an atmosphere of muted menace reminiscent of Léon Spilliaert. It is precisely within that unease that the viewer becomes part of the game of observation, a role that recurs quite literally in a pair of binoculars on a windowsill, or in a mirror that simultaneously captures a studio, a portrait, and a series of sketches pinned to the wall. Formally, the works recall film stills or storyboards, Hitchcockian in their suspense: scenes that say a great deal without a single line of dialogue.
Thoelen turns his own practice into a form of theatre: nothing is left to chance, every detail is staged. At the same time, with a nod to Lucian Freud, he pursues the honesty of the real just as much: ordinary images from daily life, based on photographs of friends, a world he builds around himself. These friends serve as models, but their seemingly nonchalant posture is carefully adjusted, a slight turn of the head, a hand resting just a touch too deliberately, so that the pose itself seems to point to something that remains just outside the frame. An image doesn't have to be sought far away: it often lies quite literally under your nose, like the shoes carelessly scattered around his studio that end up on the canvas.
A similar movement between the made and the found runs through Thoelen's work: figures disappear from the image until only a single, solitary figure remains, rendered on the canvas with an almost melodramatic, melancholic, romanticized eye. That romanticism is offset by objects that already carry a life and memory of their own: an old television, half-covered by a cloth, its screen glowing as though it were a set salvaged from a flea market; cables painted right alongside it, shaping the mood of the image. Once painted, such a found object takes on new meaning, stripped of its original function, an attention to the everyday object reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi.
Yet the work escapes pure gloom: subtle lines run through the canvases, smuggling in a touch of irony and humour, a crack in a tabletop that punctures the solemnity just in time. The melancholic and the comic, gravity and levity, are in constant contention in Thoelen's work, which can thus be read as an ongoing search for balance.
By sharpening these everyday moments while at the same time deepening them, Thoelen, like Gombrowicz, invites reflection on a larger, less tangible question: can a life, a memory, a history be captured in a coherent, meaningful story? Or does it slip away precisely when you try to do so, remaining ultimately chaotic and resistant to any attempt to find a closed pattern within it?
Text by Isabel Van Bos
