Duo exhibition Stefan Peters & Peter Waterschoot
GO TO THE SILVER SEA brings together new work by Stefan Peters and Peter Henry Waterschoot. Both Belgian artists explore how an image can open up a mental space in which perception slows down and meaning gradually unfolds. Peters takes painting as his starting point, whilst Waterschoot draws on photography. Although their media differ, they share a fascination with light, stillness and the way in which an image only reveals itself to those willing to look a little longer.
Stefan Peters (born 1978, Hasselt) presents a new series of Cityscapes, which builds on the research he developed through his successful Vistas series. Whilst those imaginary mountain landscapes explored the emptiness and vastness of the landscape, the focus now shifts to the traces of human presence. It is not the city as a recognisable place that takes centre stage, but rather the highlighting of human activity within an imaginary landscape. Fields of light nestle amongst mountains, along waterways or in the darkness, forming mental landscapes in which nature and culture merge. Peters paints these works on the reverse side of glass, a technically demanding process in which the painting is built up in reverse order. The glass is more than just a support: it deepens the light, enhances the layering of the image and transforms the act of painting itself into an experience of seeing.
Peter Henry Waterschoot (b. 1969, Ghent) presents a chromatic installation, printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, whose velvety-soft texture subtly conveys the layering of the colours. Within his body of work, colour evolves from an atmospheric element into the central subject of the photography itself. Whilst early series are based on warm amber and red tones, the work shifts via deep blues and greens towards an increasingly refined palette in which purple, magenta and pink open up their own chromatic space. His recent images approach the monochrome, where colour is no longer a property of the image but becomes the structure within which the image takes shape. This development goes hand in hand with a fundamental exploration of the possibilities of the photographic medium. Waterschoot uses colour to actively organise perception. Although his work bears similarities to that of photographers such as Dolorès Marat and Todd Hido in their focus on stillness, light and the poetic resonance of everyday places, he is developing his own trajectory in which the emphasis shifts from narrative to colour. His images invite a slowed-down, physical way of looking.
Although their approaches differ, Peters and Waterschoot share a contemporary affinity with a Belgian visual tradition in which precision, stillness, craftsmanship and a charged sense of the everyday converge. Both use light not merely as a visual element, but as a means of making space, time and memory tangible. Their work seeks intensity in simplicity: images that do not reveal themselves immediately, but gradually unfold in the viewer’s experience.
GO TO THE SILVER SEA takes its title from a verse in the cycle of poems that Peter Verhelst wrote for Peter Waterschoot’s photobook *Sunset Memory* (2021). The line refers to a mental space in which perception slows down and light, colour and memory gradually merge into one another.
“Night is falling. Shadows float above the mercury-silver sea...” — Peter Verhelst, Sunset Memory (2021)