20 october 2025, Yves Joris
The disappearance of the birds: Elia Vanderheyden at Uitstalling Art Gallery
At the Blikfabriek in Hoboken, surrounded by sawdust and printing plates, the ritual felt like a quiet preparation for what was to come. Tea as tuning, as a transition from speaking to listening. We were going to talk about his exhibition Where Have the Birds Gone at Uitstalling Art Gallery, but ended up talking about passion and focus, about how art vacillates between what still is and what already seems to have disappeared.
Elia speaks with the same thoughtfulness with which he works: not to convince, but to explore. He tells me he doesn’t come from an artistic family, that no one at home knew anything about art. For a long time, he thought he’d make video games. “I used to draw a lot,” he says, “but I never saw myself as an artist. I wanted to build worlds.” That desire remained, but changed shape. First came architecture, then restoration and finally, printmaking. Only there, in the studio, did he let go of drawing. “I used to draw hyperrealistically,” he said, “but once I started printmaking, I left drawing behind completely. I started with woodcuts and that was it. It was love at first sight.”
The detour as origin
Some artists find their voice through detours. For Elia, that detour became the path itself. He says he always starts with a need for precision and control, with an urge to understand the world. But the moment something becomes too clear, it lose its power. “Sometimes I can turn 180 degrees,” he said, laughing. “If I feel something’s becoming too predictable, I have to let it go.” Letting go became his method, his aesthetic.
On the table during our talk lies an art book on Caspar David Friedrich, the painter who captured the sublime in romantic vistas. Elia leafs through it as if searching for an old friend. Not the familiar monk or wanderer, but a strange scene: a cathedral, hidden deep in a valley, among pines—uninhabitable, yet present. “It seems realistic,” he said, “but in truth, nothing about it makes sense. And that uncanny feeling is what moves me most. You look, you think you know—and then suddenly you realise you don’t understand anything at all.”
His own landscapes evoke that same resistance to fixation. They are often inspired by existing images—sometimes from Friedrich, sometimes from photographs or old paintings—but are processed through an outdated AI program that doesn’t always understand what it sees. “I use an old program from 2019 that never really worked properly,” he said. “It keeps the colours and compositions, but loses all the details. What remains is vague, hazy—like the world remembering itself through fog.” Then he switches to Photoshop, stacking dozens, sometimes hundreds of layers, each an echo hiding the previous one. “I destroy the image,” he said, “until it becomes something I no longer recognise, but that still touches me emotionally.” ”
The digital phase is followed by the physical work, when he translates the images into woodcuts, uses a laser cutter to burn lines into the wood and then prints them with ink onto paper. The traces of that labour remain visible: charred edges, irregular patterns, breathing layers. The works are not smooth or mechanical. They bear evidence of time, of touch. “I want you to feel that a body has worked on it,” he said. “I want the work to resist.”
Elia Vanderheyden, Where have the birds gone?, 2025, Uitstalling Gallery
Where the birds are silent
The title of his exhibition, Where Have the Birds Gone, sounds melancholic, almost like an elegy, but for Elia, it isn’t a lament, but a question. “I’m not saying they’re gone,” he said. “I’m asking: why don’t we hear them?” In nature, the silence of birds signals danger. For him, that silence becomes a mirror of our perception: do we still hear the world or only ourselves?
He said he reads a lot about ecology, but resists the apocalyptic tone that often accompanies it. “For me, it’s not the end of the world,” he said. “If we disappear, the Earth will just go on. I don’t mind that. It’s the cycle of life.” That attitude sounds almost comforting, yet it also carries something unsettling: an acceptance of our dispensability. His work evokes that awareness. It doesn’t show catastrophe, but the afterimages of presence—a world that continues after we have stopped looking.
At the bookshop Stad Leest, where he works part-time, he has noticed how little demand there is for books on ecology. “There are very few,” he said, “and yet half the literature I read deals with it. Ecology has been politicised. People tune out because it’s become too moralising. Everyone says you can’t do this, you can’t do that. But no one explains why.” In his art, he tries to undo that—by avoiding slogans, explanations or moral judgments. Only images that force you to look again. “I want people to ask themselves what they’re seeing,” he said, “and why it makes them uncomfortable.”
That discomfort recalls the sublime that so fascinated the Romantics: beauty on the edge of fear, the overwhelming that cannot be grasped. “The sublime and cosmic horror overlap,” Elia said. “Both are about something too vast to comprehend, something that threatens your life, yet you can’t stop looking at. That’s what I am trying to represent in my work.”
His landscapes do indeed seem to balance on the verge of disappearance. No recognisable horizon, no clear orientation. As if the compass refuses to work. “I want three people to see three different things,” the artist explains. “There is no right answer. Maybe it’s a mountain, maybe a sea, maybe nothing at all.”
Elia Vanderheyden, There was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt, 2025, Uitstalling Gallery
The art of getting lost
When talking about his childhood, he returns to video games. “I used to play to escape,” he said. “I used cheats to wander freely—not to win, but to roam.” He took screenshots of deserted landscapes, places where nothing happened. “I have hundreds of them,” he said with a smile. “Sometimes I bought a game just because I liked the scenery.” What was once an escape has now become a method. He seeks the same kind of stillness in nature. “I can watch an ant for an hour,” he said. “Nothing happens—but that nothing is enough.”
His work is steeped in that longing for emptiness. No spectacle, no statement, just an attempt to carve out space in a world that constantly overstimulates. He lives in the city near the Rivierenhof, but says he rarely finds peace there. “Even in parks, you hear traffic,” he said. “The Hoboken polder is the only place I truly hear silence. That’s where it feels right.”
That tension between city and nature, between noise and silence, between technology and craft, runs through his entire oeuvre. He uses artificial intelligence, but always to lose control. He prints with machines, but manually—with meticulous precision. He works digitally, but seeks tangibility. His art breathes like lungs: in and out, appearing and disappearing.
Now, after years of searching, he is closing a chapter. “Everything I’ve made since 2021, I’m putting on a hard drive,” he said. “I’ll put it in a drawer—and hopefully not open it again for 20 years.”
The exhibition at Uitstalling Art Gallery in Genk marks the end of a cycle. After that, he intends to start again. In 2027, a solo exhibition will follow at the Emile Van Doren Museum, where he plans to start from new sources, new landscapes. “I’m going to rebuild everything,” he said. “New databases, new emotions, new colours.”
Elia does not harbour any grand ambitions. “I don’t want a factory,” he said. “I don’t want five laser cutters. I just want enough money to buy wood and time to work slowly.” His dream isn’t growth, but rest. “We didn’t have much growing up,” he said gently. “I just want to live comfortably—without having to choose between art and survival.”
Perhaps that is the essence of his work: the longing for slowness in a world that worships haste. Tea that needs time to steep. A woodblock that needs time to dry. An image that only gains meaning if you dare to continue to look at it.
Later, as I wander through the city the next day, I hear nothing. No cars, no voices. Only the faint rustle of air. I think of his birds—who may never have been gone at all or perhaps just avoid us because we’ve forgotten how to listen. Maybe they haven’t disappeared at all. Maybe they’ve just turned silent—waiting for humanity to finally fall quiet again.
Elia Vanderheyden, Where have the birds gone?, 2025, Uitstalling Gallery
