24 february 2026, Flor Linckens
Popel Coumou at TORCH Gallery: from optical space to tangible volume
A few lines. A colour gradient. The suggestion of a corner. Popel Coumou needs no more than that to subtly unsettle our perception. In ‘Perception’, her solo exhibition at TORCH Gallery in Amsterdam, the artist presents new work in which these precise interventions into our way of seeing once again take centre stage.
Coumou studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, but has since developed a practice that resists being confined to a single discipline. Photography is the point of departure, but the end result is something else: an architectural illusion constructed from paper, light and the human brain’s capacity to fill in the gaps. One question runs consistently through her oeuvre: how much (or how little) information is required to suggest a convincing space or reality?
Coumou builds maquette-like miniature collages from layers of paper, lights them with great precision and then photographs them using analogue techniques. With nothing more than paper and directed light she evokes space, depth and perspective. In doing so, she returns to the essential components of photography: paper, light and the ways in which the maker interprets and records reality. The resulting images are abstract and enigmatic yet also recognisable. You perceive the suggestion of a room, a corridor, a horizon, or do you? The artist plays with our expectations without always fulfilling them, generating a palpable tension.
Coumou’s visual language draws inspiration from modernism, yet she deliberately allows for small irregularities, traces of the hand that reveal the work as constructed. These subtle imperfections lend her geometric compositions a human quality.
Her labour-intensive practice is equally marked by experimentation and material research. She has previously explored materials such as plexiglass, in which colour and composition shift depending on the viewer’s angle, as well as clay and foam. For many works she also employs an unexpected material: photographs of skies. The colour gradients embedded within them, ranging from yellow to brownish purple and from bright blue to near white, create a suggestion of depth infused with inherent light.
For ‘Perception’ at TORCH Gallery, Coumou introduces aluminium as a new material, realised in freestanding sculptures. For the first time, she presents a work that fully detaches itself from the wall and stands independently within the space. It is a logical next step for an artist who has long been pressing against the limits of the flat surface. She prints directly onto the metal, cuts the lines using a waterjet cutter and then folds the forms by hand. In 2027 she will start a residency programme at the European Ceramic Work Centre, where she will continue her research in an entirely different material, that opens up quite a few new possibilities.
Presentation, too, is integral to Coumou’s practice. For her previous exhibition at Fotomuseum Den Haag she developed a specific lighting plan, and for an earlier exhibition at TORCH Gallery in 2023 she visited the gallery at night armed with a torch to study how light moves through the space and how it shapes the experience of the work.
Popel Coumou was born in Velsen in 1978 and has lived and worked in Amsterdam for many years now. Her work has been shown at Foam Amsterdam, Huis Marseille, Museum Valkhof, Fotomuseum Den Haag, Museum Escher in Het Paleis, Museum Hilversum and Collectie DE GROEN, among others. It has been included in the collections of Foam Amsterdam, Huis Marseille, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the AMC, the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the DELA Art Collection. She received a Meijburg Art Commission, a Somfy Photography Award and the Hyères Photography Competition award and was selected for Foam Talent in 2012.
