The Garden of Whispers

Through the exploration of practices as diverse as writing, directing, animation, drawing, sculpture and installation, Flemish artist Hans Op de Beeck has developed a kind of visual fiction between irony and gravity, humour and melancholy, offering the visitor/viewer a moment of wonder and introspection. Hans Op de Beeck often speaks of “experience” when he evokes his immersive sculptural installations. These are about landscapes and viewpoints, distance that is at once spatial and temporal, and the metamorphosis of the spaces invested. We can also detect the boredom and tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern lives, of a world that is going nowhere fast, as if in a loop like the ones he often uses in his videos.
In Toulouse the artist is installing a monochrome landscape in the refectory at the Jacobins which invites visitors for a moment that is sometimes silent, sometimes whispered, between fiction and reality, an invitation to meditation and dream.