Eskapismus
(Eskapismus: German – a psychological escape, a slipping out of reality.
Eskapismus is a devotional space for the outsider’s vision: creation is the most sacred form of escapism. Each artist in the exhibition forges their language out of flesh, bone, pigment, and pain. What emerges is a private cosmology: surreal, sacred, and shamelessly intimate.
Together, these artists use escapism not as avoidance, but as confrontation. Eskapismus is the scream behind the smile, the sacred inside the absurd. The courage to be ugly, excessive, too much.
“I don’t care about reality or the probability that something is true, only for its potential to stimulate the imagination.”
Stijn de Pourc's work is a collision of death, electricity, and myth. Taxidermied lambs stagger on stilts like sacrificial survivors, while birdlike creatures—stitched from bone, wire, and salvaged tech—hover midair, caught between resurrection and collapse. Ducklings are clustered together, too close, too soft, like innocence on the verge of suffocation. His installations feel like relics from a world trying to escape its own body—beautiful, broken, and barely holding shape. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a precise dream of transformation.
Mathieu V. Staelens paints a series of skeletons dressed in decadent clothes—death draped in velvet, bone wearing brocade. These works dance with morbidity rather than mourn it. They flirt with extinction, laugh in the face of decay. Death here is theatrical, queer, dandyish. It’s not a void but a mirrorball. Ornate. Ironic. Almost erotic. A necro-cabaret.
Yann Laissy paints himself as the clown, the lamb, the lonely man cast in Technicolour: all avatars of isolation refracted through fantasy. The palette is vibrant, almost childlike, but the emotion is raw: alienation dressed as carnival. Another conjures a similar solitude—figures suspended in bright emptiness, characters longing for a world that’s too loud, too much, too far away. It’s vulnerability as performance, sadness as spectacle.
