29 may 2025, Yves Joris
On the desire for images to disappear
In the Daytripper exhibition, Shoobil presents four artists, each of whom travels through images, memories and meanings in a different way. What does it mean to be on a journey without a destination as a day tripper, wanderer, flaneur of fleeting impressions? Tracing the path of their work entails searching, drifting and listening.
A fur coat hangs against a blood-red background. It is lush, retro and ominously still, enclosed within a frame. No mannequin, no body. Only the back, like a portrait from behind, where the face escapes the viewer’s gaze. This is one of the works by Frank JMA Castelyns in Daytripper, the group exhibition at Shoobil that brings together four artists around the notion of drifting and ephemeral encounters. The visitor is a passerby, the maker a traveler and the image a stopover.
Frank JMA Castelyns, VESTIS VANITAS, 2002, Shoobil
On the back of Castelyns’ coat is a gold-coloured symbol that merges a dollar sign with a hammer and sickle, as if the communist ideal had been reinvented by an advertising agency. The golden shine entices yet undermines. The coat is more than just a garment; it is an ideological icon that has lost its body. It recalls the aesthetics of protest, but is framed like a luxury item. Capitalism as camouflage. The wearer is gone and that is essential to its meaning. What remains is a trace, a skin without memory. Or rather, a memory without skin. Castelyns is depicting the melancholy of disappearance—a theme that reverberates throughout the exhibition. What happens to an idea when it only exists as an image?
Bart Vandevijvere, I'd better give you tulips instead, 2025, Shoobil
Looking as jazz: rhythm, noise and residual sound
In that sense, the work of Bart Vandevijvere offers a polyphonic counterbalance. In his paintings, you can sense the aimless journey: not a static narrative, but a rhythmic sequence in which each composition responds to the previous one, like echoes in a free jazz improvisation. Forms are repeated, broken, rebuilt. Colours slide against each other like chords, searching for friction and resonance.
With Vandevijvere, each painting is a waystation. You see the gesture and the hesitation. Here is someone who does not want to hide doubt, but uses it as a strength. Some of the paintings appear graphic—psychedelic even—with a touch of Kandinsky. Yet behind that spontaneous brushwork lies a sensitivity that evokes the silence between two notes, the space between what has been and what is to come.
Catharina Hell, Piëta, 2023, Shoobil
Whispering images and disappearing words
In the more conceptually charged work of Catharina Hell, getting lost is taken almost literally. Her creations explore meaning, repetition and hesitation, with language that undermines itself, words and images that slowly dissolve. She works with what is absent, invisible, unsaid. In her work, the failure of communication is not a problem, but the foundation of ironic poetics.
An edgy example of this ironic, meandering stance is the work Piëta, where the words ‘Against all authority except my mom’ glow in stark neon light. The title inevitably evokes the Christian iconography of Mary cradling her dead son, the traditional symbol of surrender, comfort and human tragedy. But here, the classical pathos is subverted by a nearly punk-like phrase, rebellious and tender at the same time. ‘Authority’ is rejected—except for the one figure who doesn’t rely on power, but on intimacy: the mother.
In the context of Daytripper, this combination is meaningful. It highlights the ambiguous position of the artist as someone who evades systems, conventions and power, yet still searches for an anchor. The day tripper from the Beatles song may recognise themselves in this paradoxical stance: ironic and sensitive, rejecting and connected, going nowhere—but not without a past.
Elvis Borrey, Untitled, 2025, Shoobil
And then there’s Elvis Borrey
His work is poised in the twilight zone between documentary and fiction. He uses photography, video and sound as tools to make memory tangible—while at the same time exposing it. His themes are personal yet universal: migration, identity, collective memory. His work feels like an archive of what was never recorded, like an attempt to give form to that which is at risk of being forgotten. Borrey’s images possess a gentle melancholy, confronting us with the fact that memory is always a construction. His sounds resemble voices from elsewhere. You hear the sliding of suitcases, the hiss of an old recording, the whisper of someone trying to tell their story, but unable to find the words. He takes us on a journey through the memory of others and leaves us wondering what our own role is.
Not a manifesto, but an invitation
She was a day tripper. A Sunday driver, yeah… John Lennon’s voice still echoes and that half-serious tone, that playful melancholy, echoes through this exhibition. In Daytripper, we wander among works of art that constantly throw us off balance: between irony and seriousness, between memory and misunderstanding, between movement and stillness.
Castelyns shows a missing body. Vandevijvere composes without a score. Hell lets language dissolve into itself. Borrey assembles memory like a fragile mirror. Each of them is a day tripper in a unique way: someone who doesn’t stay, but is intensely present in the temporariness of the moment.
