03 april 2025, Emily Van Driessen
Julien Saudubray — Icônes / Akènes
Over the past months, Julien Saudubray (b. 1985, France) developed a new body of drawings and sculptures. The result, 'Icônes / Akènes', is now on view at Wouters Gallery in Brussels. The exhibition brings together two series on paper, one in colour, one in charcoal, along with three sculptures assembled from studio leftovers. The title is set up like a mirror: two words that echo one another in form and sound, yet point in opposite directions. “I wanted to present two proposals that both conflict and reflect each other,” says Julien Saudubray. The first ideas for the exhibition emerged during a residency in Athens, late 2024.
A Residency that Reset the Senses
“I knew my work too well,” Julien says. “I needed an escape door.” He spent a month and a half in Athens, not to find a new direction, but to forget what he already knew. The city offered a shift in rhythm and light. “Athens is full of history,” he says. “It reconnects you to the whole tradition of representation.”
He was especially drawn to Cycladic sculptures: small, monolithic figures found in graves, associated with paganism rather than institutional religion. “They’re carved directly from the stone, the figure is already inside.” That idea, that the image reveals itself from within, became a thread running through the entire exhibition.
Light from Within
Working with limited materials, Saudubray began painting with just red, yellow, and blue. “I reduced everything to the essential. No canvas, just paper.” The paper, given to him by a friend in Athens, became the shared surface for both series: colourful portraits and black-and-white flower studies. It was, as he calls it, les choses fortuites — the kind of unexpected element that steers the work into new territory. “That gesture led the rest. I took it as a sign.”
Julien Saudubray, Figure #06, 2025, Wouters Gallery. Photo: Luk Vander Plaetse.
In the portraits, colour was layered almost archaeologically, allowing the figure to slowly emerge. “At first it was very formal, but then figures began to appear,” he says. “They’re not portraits of people. They just come from the mind.” He describes the process as empirical, built up layer by layer, shaped by close attention to the behaviour of the material. “I am searching the figure inside the surface.”
This was both a return and a break. “I come from a figurative background, but I had quit that slowly. I wanted to break with my own skills. Now these figures come back, maybe from memory, maybe from something deeper, but I don’t control them. I let them appear.”
After the intensity of colour, he returned to line, shadow, and restraint. “I wanted to go back to charcoal. Something very classical, very basic. I needed to return to shape.”
The charcoal bouquets, shaky and unresolved, draw on older visual languages. “I really love those vases from 3000 BC. They wobble. They’re not very precise.” Roman architecture also comes to mind, precisely because of its incompleteness. “There’s something beautiful in things that aren’t fully resolved.”
Julien Saudubray, Bouquet #02, 2025, Wouters Gallery. Photo: Luk Vander Plaetse.
A Sculptural Unity
At the centre of each space stand three sculptures made from scraps of wood, discarded canvas, and failed paintings. “Most of the time, they were just lying on the floor, under the paintings while I worked,” says Julien. “They carry the drops, the traces, almost like negatives of the work.” Assembled without a fixed plan, they balance on their pedestals like small, primal figures. “They’re not made from an idea. I just assemble what’s left.”
The three sculptures play a central role in tying the exhibition together. Visually, they echo both the colours of the portraits and the graphic quality of the charcoal drawings. Conceptually, they bridge the distance between the static and the fleeting. “Their round shapes, like aureoles, link back to the icons. But it’s also the form of the seed, the akène, that floats off when you blow on it. That gesture, giving the seeds a chance to grow again, it feels very romantic.”
The title 'Icônes / Akènes' captures that tension. Icons are charged, enduring, historically defined. Akènes are light, ephemeral, carried by the wind. It’s here that Julien returns to a quote by Philip Guston, one he often rereads: “It worked perfectly, but there was no unity. So I covered it with white.” In a show built from fragments — paper found by chance, paintings made by layering, sculptures from leftovers — unity isn’t something planned. It emerges, like the figures in his drawings, from what’s already there, from within.
Julien Saudubray, Assemblage #01, 2025, Wouters Gallery. Photo: Luk Vander Plaetse.
