09 september 2025, Indra Devriendt
Imagery as encounter at Sofie Van de Velde Gallery
Different media, multiple perspectives, shared sensitivities and friendship as a connecting factor. The Sofie Van de Velde Gallery is presenting paintings by Felix De Clercq, photographs by Max Pinckers and a video work by Gauthier Oushoorn & Ingel Vaikla. Their various works converge in intersections, echoes and shared motifs.
Felix De Clercq and Max Pinckers are each presenting a solo exhibition. De Clercq usually starts from a photograph, taking a snapshot of a scene, pose or moment. By sketching the scene several times, a process of reduction and transformation emerges. The result is not a photorealistic representation, but a painterly memory of reality. While he once worked with oil on canvas, De Clercq now shows only gouaches on paper. Over the past year, he has devoted himself entirely to this technique.
His work has been compiled in a book for this exhibition. The change in material influences his work. Gouache is fast-drying and matte. Although his melancholic colour palette remains, the tones appear fresher. His scenes are bathing in twilight and exude a lighter, more spontaneous ambience than his earlier oil paintings. Through their size and the white frame around the scenes, the pieces resemble pages from a diary: intimate, narrative and fragmentary. They feel more like fragments of memory than developed reconstructions.
Felix De Clercq, Jonathan (II), 2025. Gouache on paper. Copyright: The Artist
The exhibition consists of three series. In the first, friends and acquaintances pose in his studio. “For this series, I pay subtle homage to A Summer’s Tale by Éric Rohmer,” says De Clercq. “I provided the models with stills from the film so they could be inspired by poses and clothing.” Dialogue with other artists is a constant in his practice. From time to time, he makes copies of painters from the past. “I study how things are painted and I like to incorporate homages into my presentations.”
The second series consists of larger formats in which individual portraits converge into a single scene. This creates uncanny relationships between the figures. The third series shows interiors and street scenes, fragments of his studio and living environment. Together, the gouaches form an exploration of identity, memory and space.
Felix De Clercq, Still life with watch and book, 2025. Gouache on paper. Copyright: The Artist
Both De Clercq and Pinckers reflect on image-making, but via different paths. Pinckers questions the photographic image, while De Clercq wants to break away from it. He paints not to record, but to remember. Pinckers is presenting photographs from his series 2020-MMXX, created during a residency in Rome under the COVID-19 lockdown. “The city of Rome invites a number of photographers each year,” he explains. “They are given carte blanche, as long as they work within the city district and donate a selection to the photo archive.”
A keen observer will notice that the scenes are photographed simultaneously from different viewpoints. Pinckers used multiple analogue cameras released at the same moment. This creates images of a single moment, but from different perspectives. “I found it an interesting way to emphasise time within a still image,” he says. “In details, such as an action, you discover simultaneity. Our eyes cannot do this, which evokes a strange sense of time and space. To me, this captures the experience of that time period.”
Max Pinckers, 2020-MMXX (2020)
The title 2020-MMXX refers to the year of its creation, also written in Roman numerals. By placing the two side by side, Pinckers emphasises the notion of time as a construct. The double notation underscores the weight of that year: a moment etched into our collective memory.
Although his photos technically capture a single moment, they feel like stretched time. The atmosphere of that period, when everything seemed to stand still yet shift, resonates in the images. Pinckers undermines the classical notion of photography as the capturing of one decisive moment. He transforms time into a multiple experience, reminding us that every photograph hides something and every story has multiple perspectives. One of the most emotionally charged images shows two sisters on a balcony. In each shot, we meet the gaze of one of them. Their look is vulnerable and intense.
“Technically, it was challenging,” says Pinckers. The photo in which three viewpoints succeeded works particularly well. We see young people hanging out by the rocks. The choice of black-and-white prints reinforces the timeless character and creates a sense of unity in the presentation. Pinckers uses technique to question the medium itself. “I devote attention to both the subject and the medium,” he says. “That intersection is important.” His photos regularly feature his camera and tripod—whether through shadows or directly. Everything is staged. He carefully selects locations and the people pose. In different photos we see litter, graffiti and urbanism from one viewpoint, while another shows Roman architecture, parks, and greenery. The result is different versions of a single memory.
Pinckers has invited Gauthier Van Oushoorn, who also did a residency at the Academia Belgica and stayed in Rome during the same period. The video work EUR42 (2022) is a collaboration between Gauthier Van Oushoorn & Ingel Vaikla. We see a group of motorcyclists riding through the EUR district (Esposizione Universale di Roma) at night. “This residential and business district was built by Mussolini in 1942 for a world exhibition that never took place,” Oushoorn explains. “It refers to a final scene from Fellini’s Roma.” Their headlights glide over historic facades and sculptures, while the roar of engines creates a menacing atmosphere.
As with Pinckers, time takes centre stage. The interplay of light and shadow on the buildings and sculptures raises questions about past and present. Although they employ different media, they share a critical approach to image, space and power. Their attention to the everyday and use of non-professional actors recalls Italian neorealism—not as a style, but as a framework for reflection. In EUR42, architecture becomes a visible bearer of ideology. The video directs our gaze: what do we see and who determines this? Through its loop structure, the motorcycles keep riding, trapped in a time frame. Rome becomes a temporary home in which friendship and artistic exchange converge.
Gauthier Van Oushoorn & Ingel Vailkla, EUR42 (2022), in tentoonstelling Max Pinckers, 2020-MMXX (2020)
The exhibiting artists use different media, but share sensitivities. Each questions the image, gaze and truth in a unique way. They share a fascination for the space between fact and imagination, for light, shadow and atmosphere. Their friendship subtly seeps into the gallery space in the form of a visual dialogue. These are autonomous presentations, yet with an emotional and intellectual closeness between the two. Their friendship is palpable in how they respect, complement and challenge each other’s language. They question and strengthen one another. Each work stands alone, but bears traces of the other. Whether they are portraying one another, inviting each other in or highlighting each other’s medium, we see a shared looking: at one another and at the image.
De Clercq paints a self-portrait of Pinckers with his camera. In doing so, De Clercq is acknowledging their friendship, but also pointing to fundamentally different approaches to image-making. Pinckers and De Clercq share a fascination with how an image comes into being and is always an interpretation. Pinckers photographs a painting by De Clercq in his studio with multiple cameras. Each shot is a choice, a perspective. A painting acquires an interpretation through every lens. And what is a photograph of a painting? A document, an interpretation or an appropriation? This work forms a visual and conceptual link within the gallery space, where painterly imagination and the photographic gaze meet.
The exhibiting artists render each other’s practice visible. Art arises in dialogue: between maker and medium, between friend and colleague, between gaze and imagination. And in that in-between space of shared understanding, meaning takes shape.
Felix De Clercq, Sofie Van de Velde Gallery
