10 june 2025, Yves Joris
Future Visions at Gallery Ysebaert: Where wonder reinvents itself
At Gallery Ysebaert, the Future Visions exhibition reveals a landscape of the future that presents itself in the guise of art. Or is it the other way around, with art disguised as the future? What is on display here is not a classic collection of images, but a zone of transition: between human and machine, between the constructed and the unpredictable.
The work does not seem to offer answers, but rather raise questions – questions about who or what will still create, feel or astonish in the future. Between sculpture and algorithm, between body and code, a new sensitivity becomes tangible, a future that cannot be predicted, but can be intuited.
I catch myself lingering longer than expected at the work of Nick Ervinck. As if I’m trying to decipher a language whose letters are carved in the air. His sculptures—or are they remnants of imaginary organisms?—spiral slowly, like echoes of another time. No mass, no weight, only form as thought. Each piece seems like a statement of what has not yet happened, a plastic metaphor for the not-yet-being.
I think of how, in the Middle Ages, cathedrals were built as prayers in stone. So, what is this then? A digital prayer? A homage to the spirit that no longer wants to reside in flesh, but inhabits pixels and algorithms? The future, it seems, is a domain that is slowly detaching itself from humanity, stretching into directions for which we (still) have no words. And yet here it is: tangible, visible, a form of being without anecdote. And that may be the most confrontational aspect.
At the same time, AI is not merely an instrument here nor an impersonal machine wielding a brush. It has become a creative partner, a co-creator who, with its computational power and data streams, opens up new possibilities. Whereas humans traditionally project their inner world, AI complements it with algorithmic surprises, crossing the borders of our imagination. The result is a duet between intuition and calculation, between vulnerability and precision.
Ommery De Zutter
Shadows in fields of light
In Ommery De Zutter’s installation, the distance between viewer and artwork becomes fluid. I put on a VR headset and disappear into an environment that rearranges my senses. No museum wall, no frame, only the haptic closeness of a reality that breathes virtually. I walk, I move and yet I am fully aware that I am standing still. A paradox of experience, as if the body is protesting against the brainwashing of images too real to be true.
Patrick Tresset
And then there is the robot by Patrick Tresset, a strange student, a mechanical alter ego who touches the paper with its metal arm like a child learning to draw. I sit down in the chair and become a willing model. The lines that emerge are tangible traces of something that knows no skin, no memory, no desire. And yet there is beauty, a kind of emotion that surprises me. As if despite everything, I recognise a spark. What is this then: imitation or revelation? Maybe that difference does not matter, I think later on the drive home.
Still, this collaboration between human and machine raises ethical questions. Who is the artist? Who bears responsibility? Is AI merely a tool or is it becoming an author? Art becomes a domain where authenticity and originality must be redefined. What does it mean to truly create in a time of generative algorithms?
I wonder, if art arises from the friction between human and world, what does it mean when that friction is taken over by code, by pattern recognition and algorithmic thinking? What remains of the inner necessity, of the urge to express something that doesn’t even understand itself?
Art was once the realm of the resisting—rebelling—spirit. Now it has become a game of data and instruction, of collaboration between human and more-than-human. It reminds me of a passage from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror…” Perhaps that’s precisely what it is: beauty shivering at its own beginning.
The future in fibre and signals
Tom Van Der Borght’s performance is the apotheosis of the merger between body and artificial intelligence. His AI-generated wearable art moves like skin with a mind of its own—a second self that does not adapt, but challenges. The models—or are they carriers of meanings yet to find grammar?—move through space like signs of a language still waiting to happen.
I get a sense that this is not just fashion. It is a manifesto, a prophecy. Here, identity is no longer claimed, but generated. Not chosen, but compiled. No past is needed, only a set of parameters outlining a possible future.
The unpredictability of AI-generated art, with its own rules and unexpected turns, adds a layer that both fascinates and unsettles. AI creates without emotion, without intentional desire, and yet it touches something deeply human. This inhuman nature confronts us with the paradox that beauty can emerge from what lies beyond our control.
And yet… within all this futuristic aesthetic, there is also a sense of melancholy. The melancholy of disappearance, of the body becoming obsolete, of the hand no longer needing to sketch, of the dream transferring its logic to AI. We are moving—without quite realising it—toward a world in which the artificial supplants the necessary. Where art no longer struggles, but is optimised. Still, I think that perhaps art will always escape. Perhaps that is its true nature. Each time it is captured in a new form, it wriggles free. Who knows, maybe the artist will return as a hacker, as cyber-alchemist. Or as a wanderer in virtual landscapes he himself does not understand. Because even the most intelligent machine cannot, as far as I know, program wonder.
A mirror without a surface
As I stand outside in sunlight still falling through leaves the old-fashioned way, I feel somewhat disoriented. Not disturbed, but changed in mood. A bit like after reading a novel where you didn’t grasp every sentence, but it still transformed you.
What I saw in Future Visions was not a utopia nor dystopia—but a borderland. A place where art and technology do not neutralise but challenge each other. Where the future is not predicted, but generated in real time.
What will art be in 50 years? Perhaps a sense, detached from the body. Perhaps an entity, autonomous and reflective. Or maybe, as it has always been, a mirror. But then a mirror without surface or frame. A mirror in which we do not see ourselves, but what might one day replace us.
