15 august 2025, Flor Linckens
Christian Ouwens Gallery in fluorescent blue
In the twilight everything changes. Colours shift, shapes fade, and familiar images suddenly reveal themselves to be something else entirely. The mysterious exhibition 'Nature After Dark' in Christian Ouwens Gallery in Rotterdam focuses on that tipping point: the moment when daylight disappears and nature reveals another, sometimes unpredictable face. The exhibition will be on view until 6 September 2025.
The gallery brings together a diverse group of artists for this show, from established names such as Armando, Karel Appel, Carel Visser and Eugène Brands to contemporary voices including Micha Patiniott, James Aldridge and Piet Hein Eek. The exhibition also features work by Sir Quentin Blake, celebrated worldwide for his illustrations for a.o. Roald Dahl and represented by the gallery since June.
In this setting, the works take on new resonance and context. The blacklight removes the space from daylight, leaving only what responds: fluorescent lines, nodes, traces and optical brighteners in paper. The intense blue of the UV light feels at once harsh and artificial yet also recalls bioluminescence, the mysterious glow emitted by organisms in the night. One thing is certain: the UV glow renders the everyday strange, and some works acquire an almost unsettling quality. It wouldn't surprise you if they would begin to whisper to one another, the moment the light dims.
In some works, colours emerge as though a hidden layer has risen to the surface. In Aldridge’s work, for example, vivid green and orange-red lines appear, glowing like nerve pathways or branch structures in the dark. Blake’s gentle lavender palette does not take on a bright glow under blacklight but instead acquires an almost ghostly haze. The paper coolly illuminates while his ink lines linger like suspended shadows in a twilight that feels not of this world.
The exhibition 'Nature After Dark' invites the viewer to look more slowly. The longer you watch, the more details reveal themselves: colours adapting to the artificial light, structures lighting up or dissolving into the shadow. It is an experience that shifts, depending on your state of mind at the time. The variety of media heightens the sense of unpredictability, making the exhibition feel like a nocturnal walk without a map. The artists show how the world changes when familiar points of reference are gone, perhaps a metaphor for the times we live in. Without the anchor of daylight, intuition and imagination take over, and anything becomes possible.
