Nicolas Party's 'Toile d'araignée' at Xavier Hufkens

Swiss artist Nicolas Party presents his fourth exhibition with Xavier Hufkens, titled 'Toile d'araignée' (Spider's Web). The show features five distinct groups of works, each occupying a specific spatial and conceptual position within the gallery. Rather than following a linear narrative, the exhibition is structured as a sequence that emphasizes visual and thematic correspondences. Some motifs are familiar from Party's previous work, while others appear for the first time. A notable new series of pastels is inspired by images from Georges Rodenbach's 1892 symbolist novel 'Bruges-la-Morte', which was notable for incorporating photographs into its text. Party uses cropping and abstraction to shift focus from architectural representation to reflection, with water playing a central transformative role—forms dissolve, blur, and become amorphous. Bridges function as stable structural elements that anchor the compositions. The cultural lineage of the exhibition extends from Rodenbach's novel to later reinterpretations, including 'D'entre les morts' by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, which served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film 'Vertigo'. Across these works, themes of duplication, repetition, and indeterminacy of identity come to the fore. This stratified genealogy shapes the entire presentation, where images remain suspended—vital but inert, visible but evanescent—suggesting a world in which forms are continuously built, dissolved, and reinvented.