ART AND DESIGN: DIGITAL AND HANDCRAFTED SCULPTURE

The exhibition Nocturnal Journey by Hans Op de Beeck at the KMSKA in Antwerp (March 22 – August 17, 2025) offers a carefully designed immersive path where sculpture, sound, and narrative converge to recreate a silent, enigmatic nocturnal park

The exhibition Nocturnal Journey by Hans Op de Beeck at the KMSKA in Antwerp (March 22 – August 17, 2025) offers a carefully designed immersive path where sculpture, sound, and narrative converge to recreate a silent, enigmatic nocturnal park. Comprising 39 life-sized, monochromatic sculptures, this installation presents itself as a “total artwork” (Gesamtkunstwerk): a physical and mental journey that navigates the blurred line between reality and dream.

Art and Design: Digital and Handcrafted Sculpture

One of the most original features of Op de Beeck’s work is his use of digital technologies in the design phase, such as 3D scanning, followed by the manual crafting of the pieces. This hybrid method allows him to capture the detailed precision and texture of real objects while recontextualizing them within a silent sculptural space. From a critical perspective, this approach raises questions about the artist’s role in the digital age: is he more of a designer-programmer than a classical sculptor? And yet, thanks to his mastery of form and his ability to group elements, he remains unmistakably a visual storyteller.

The Aesthetics of Stillness: Silence, Dust, and Scale

The use of grey and white tones—as if the figures were “covered in a layer of dust”—emphasises a suspended tempo: the scenes appear like frames from a paused film, a moment just before or after something unexpected. As in his previous works (Night Time, Staging Silence), each object here—a soap bubble, a lone rider, chairs, tables, sleeping children—carries a subtle yet persistent emotional weight. Op de Beeck does not believe in spectacle; he believes in the resonance of the minimal.

Dialogue, History, and Vanitas

At first glance, the exhibition might appear sober, even academic. But beneath this apparent silence lies a deliberate attempt to establish a historical dialogue with the KMSKA’s collection. Numerous references to the theme of vanitas—the fragility of life—emerge in works such as Vanitas XL or Tatiana (Soap Bubble), where the bubble evokes sudden mortality, always on the verge of bursting. In The Horseman, the traditional hero is replaced by a solitary traveller—a restrained but powerful gesture that reframes history through personal experience.

Sound Immersion and Nocturnal Atmosphere

A discreet and consistent soundscape accompanies the viewer’s journey through the space, reinforcing the sense of being inside a twilight environment that transcends ordinary time. The combination of sonic, visual, and spatial elements makes the experience feel like a slow, almost ritualistic performance. Visitors do not merely observe—they become guests in a meticulously crafted world.

Conceptual Tensions

An intriguing tension arises between the digital and the handcrafted. While 3D technology ensures accuracy, the physical presence of polyester or resin recovers the tangible materiality of sculpture. Op de Beeck delivers a compelling statement: the scanner reproduces reality, but the artist reinterprets, organizes, and rewrites it sculpturally. The result is not a cold copy, but a poetic echo, filled with temporality and emotion.

With his largest exhibition in Belgium to date, Op de Beeck confirms his ability to transform the ordinary into a universal aesthetic experience. Yet, the monochromatic, meditative, and empathetic tone may feel inaccessible to those seeking overt narratives. Visitors expecting a show of impactful images might feel disoriented—this body of work demands an active, receptive gaze.

But that demand is its greatest strength: this exhibition cannot be consumed in passing. One must pause, contemplate the suspended dust, listen to the pulse of the atmosphere, and open up to the nostalgia awakened by figures frozen in time. Only then can one understand that Nocturnal Journey at KMSKA is more than a visual experience—it is a tactile poetics, a contemporary inquiry into the passage of time, memory, and the dialogue between tradition and technology.

In short, Hans Op de Beeck inaugurates a new form of sculpture in the heart of Antwerp: a sculpture born from pixels and 3D scans, that speaks through silence and dust—and that ultimately confronts us with our own transitory nature. A body of work capable of whispering the eternal.