The Silent Reflection Immersive Installation, 2024. Mixed media

For the Elleboog Church, Hans Op de Beeck created a new, site-specific, immersive installation, as has been his practice at a wide variety of the most diverse locations for the past twenty years. What it’s about is the creation of a mysterious location with architectural as well as rural dimensions, where he invites the viewer to find a moment of reflection and peace. Even though these staged locations are undeniably unreal, often surreal and/or absurd, they can nonetheless provide an authentic experience for the receptive viewer. Op de Beeck isn’t attempting to simulate reality in his work, but to evoke a mood touching on the essence of reality beneath its skin. To that end, he often choses for a severely reduced and interpreted pallet of one, two or three colours, or an entirely monochrome scheme as such. The result of this amounts to a reduction of the anecdotal quality of reality in full colour, lending silence and petrifying his presentation into a more still and monolithic whole.

In the Elleboog Church he installed a large, milky, softly rippling body of water with white rocks in it, bare trees and reeds. The rear wall of the church has been used by the artist to suggest an opening outward, as if the white water of a lake ripples into the church. A slight horizon of hills is visible, above which can be found a softly glowing presentation of the sun.

From a stand at the front of the church, the viewer is invited to sit down and to look out, from a certain height - as if on a bank - over the milky white water towards the distance and to let their thoughts flow. Water isn’t reflective merely in the literal sense of the word, figuratively speaking, it also invites reflection as such, contemplative thought with regards to being and the world. For this reason, we often seek out water, whether a lake, a seascape or a pond. It’s almost as though water, and its reflection, slows down our breathing to stimulate reverie.