Galerie Fontana – Duo Presentation: Thijs Segers and Feipel & Bechameil
For Art Rotterdam, Galerie Fontana presents a duo exhibition bringing together the work of Thijs Segers and the artist duo Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil. Although working in different media and scales, both practices reflect on the fragile relationship between human presence, the constructed world, and the living environment that surrounds us.
In his paintings, Thijs Segers approaches nature as a deeply personal and existential terrain. Arid landscapes, withered plants and seemingly ordinary scenes, a dog, a chair, an overgrown garden, become quiet meditations on impermanence. Rooted in a sensibility reminiscent of 19th-century Romanticism, Segers explores feelings of longing, homesickness and vulnerability. His works exist in a suspended moment, somewhere between the lightest light and the darkest dark, where melancholy is tempered by acceptance. For Segers, painting becomes an intimate way of embracing transience and acknowledging the cyclical rhythm of growth and decay that defines both nature and human life.
The artist duo Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil approach similar questions from a different perspective. Since 2008 they have developed a multidisciplinary practice that combines sculpture, installation, engineering and scenography. Their works explore the structures that shape contemporary life, architecture, technology and systems of control, often revealing a world where illusion, instability and theatricality coexist. By appropriating industrial technologies and robotics within an artistic context, they critically reflect on the social, political and ecological conditions of our time.
In their recent work, Feipel & Bechameil increasingly place the living at the center of their reflections. Rather than focusing solely on how modernity transformed our relationship to the world, they question how it has disrupted ecological balance and endangered multiple forms of life. Their installations seek to reawaken a sensitivity to the simplest living presences around us.
Together, the works of Segers and Feipel & Bechameil create a dialogue between the intimate and the systemic, the personal landscape and the constructed environment. Both practices invite viewers to reconsider their place within a world in constant transformation, where fragility and resilience coexist and where the act of looking can become a gesture of care toward the living.