SOLITESSE — SB34

︎ SB34 concorde

SOLITESSE

Fabiola Burgos Labra, Massao Mascaro, Wim De Pauw & Reinier Vrancken

curated by Léane Lloret

27.03 - 24.05.25

solitesse invites to reflect on the intrinsic stigma of everyday life and our relationship with perception. The works of Fabiola Burgos Labra, Massao Mascaro, Wim De Pauw and Reinier Vrancken stand out as testimonies of fleeting moments, like traces collected in the shadow of visible silhouettes. These silhouettes are those of well-known or anonymous monuments, from the Latin monumentum, derived from the verb moneo “to remember”.

Gathered for the inauguration of the new SB34 concorde space, the artworks of different techniques and forms raise the question of what distinguishes the work of art from the product, and of its unique persistence. Halfway between past and future, the duality of these projections’s testimonies questions the legitimacy of a congress of our soliloquious monuments.

︎ TEXT

It seems that swallows are disappearing. At dawn, they dive, to spend the winter, transforming into seashells – they always return. The swallows form circles, replicating the movement of the rising sun. They repeat, reflect, increase ceaselessly. During their journey, they travel the world. A few wingbeats, and they are gone; reliefs behind, cutting through canyons, grazing the mountains. Sometimes, they take an interest in the hum of our cities, making a stop at our knots. They settle in and set up there. The show is prepared from the telegraph wire. From there, they listen to the sirens wailing – incandescent lights flooding the monuments. Interrupting their long tracking shots, they become eyewitnesses, affirming the punctuation of our evidence – that for so long now, we are no longer gathering. Yet these traces share the same desire for eternal life. This desire to survive is projected through both the gesture and its destination. From a collaboration, a congress, an association on which success depends, issues… our concord. While images circulate freely, endlessly distorting, these monuments are trapped in the material world. Solid by definition, our monuments refuse to die.

This exhibition is like a harvest – the fruit of labour left to dry on tarps, under trellises. Home to collected works, like the twigs the swallows covet. Their silhouettes are made of gestures, traces, memories – of chimera. Alive, they whisper like wind on branches. They contain secrets, whistles, silences. To preserve them, swallows camouflage them with a bit of mud, earth, mixing it with saliva, with mucus. With their beaks, they shape their nests alongside humours. In shelters stuck to the beams, this paste – as fragile as it is solid – cannot be moved. It is single and unique: attached to its environment and context. The swallows also build their own monuments. They nest in them for a while, leave them for some time, return to them later. Wherever they are, they know they exist – somewhere.

It seems that the swallows are disappearing.
Just because we no longer see them doesn’t mean we can’t remember their song and whistle.

Léane Lloret
Translated by Jack Cox

*Texte original en français (PDF)

︎ LIST OF WORKS

Massao Mascaro
Sans Titre (Fantômes), 2019-2025,
Silver gelatin prints on baryte paper, aluminium frame, museum glass, 24 x 30 cm

Fabiola Burgos Labra
Structure that Builds Space, Also Confines It IV, 2025
Gift ribbon on metal mesh, 200 x 13 x 13 cm

Fabiola Burgos Labra
167 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 2022
Bronze, 46,5 x 1 cm

Wim De Pauw,
A King Listens, 2025
Video and sound installation, 4’’14 min

Reinier Vrancken,
swallowswallow, 2025
Jeweller's ring sizers, brass, dimensions variable

︎ ABOUT

FABIOLA BURGOS LABRA (born in 1984, Rancagua, Chile) collects popular expressions, sometimes linked to her personal history. Her work is characterized by an intuition tied to given context. The focus is on processes, material culture and the narrative thread that emerges from them. Burgo Labra engages with the materials around her, inviting the to communicate through their use and the historiography she highlights by following the logics of circulation. She also reclaims Latin American craft traditions, valuing their origins both public and domestic, luxurious and precarious. Fabiola Burgos Labra lives and works in Brussels.

MASSAO MASCARO (born in 1990, Lille, France) gravitate around territories where he enjoys wandering. His work strikes a delicate balance between autobiography, topography and politics. Blending documentary and poetry, Massao composes lyrical and literary journeys throug cities along the Mediterranean Sea: from the Calabria of his ancestors to the mythical space of the garden, passing through the streets and parks of Madrid. His work is profoundly political, as it is rooted in the need to explore the relationship between humans and the cultural and geographical spaces they inhabit. Massao Mascaro lives and works between Brussels and Geneva.

WIM DE PAUW (born in 1989, Ghent, Belgium) explores language as an unstable material, a space of hesitation. He is interested in what eludes naming, in what unfolds withi silences, gaps, and dissonances. Depending on the context, his work operates through displacement and affinities, notably via collaborations or forms of hybrid artistic identities. In 2020, he founded the fictional institutio The Letter Space Department (TLSD) to establish a series of collaborations. Architecture and language form the starting points of his reflections and the choice of media structuring the production of (sound) installations, video, textual, and visual works. His collections and associations of texts and images generate shifts in meaning, forms of absence, and oxymorons—rupture points that interest the artist for their potential: moments when something falters or wavers, where the visible and the sayable reveal a remainder, a persistent fault. Wim De Pauw lives and works in Brussels.

REINIER VRANCKEN (born in 1992, Weert, Netherlands) moves in and out of material and immaterial worlds through oblique connections and poetic leaps. His installations, interventions, objects, and books lyrically test the shifting contours of physical and conceptual bodies—their diffusio and plurality being central to his artistic practice—and become entry points to articulate their underlying relationships. Reinier Vrancken lives and works in Rotterdam.

MATHILDE CHAIZE is a Brussels-based artist, trained in scenography at La Cambre following studies in political science and journalism. Her practice focuses on performance, using the body alongside audiovisual and sound work as tools for emotional exploration. She investigates the figure of the contemporary clown as a way to question the reappropriation of the female body, emotional freedom, and the right to be "too much"—rejecting social norms and conventions. Her work also explores the connections between reality TV shows, opera, and other forms of authority that shape drama- turgy.

LÉANE LLORET (b. 1999, Grenoble, France) uses her eclectic background to look to different sources - particularly those that are off-screen. Her work which often uses metaphor is rooted in concepts, historical and sociological references, memory and material testimonies, with the aim of creating narratives from ‘what remains’. She is particularly interested in the relationship between time and space; context and gesture; books and vitrines; as the presence of an inherent duality. In 2021, she graduated from the École du Louvre - Palais du Louvre, Paris, where she specialized in Fashion and Costume History. After a spell into the Fashion Design department at ENSAV La Cambre, she became interested in images and objects. Her experience at Saint-Martin Bookshop in Brussels helped her make the transition to curation, particularly through the exhibition of artists' books.

︎ Open on Fri. and Sat. 14:00 - 18:00 and by appointment

︎ Art Brussels OFF Programme :
open exclusively on Wednesday 23.04 (nocturne) 17:30-21:30
open on Thursday 24.04, Friday 25.04, Saturday 26.04 and Sunday 27.04 14:00-18:00

︎ Finissage on Saturday 24.05, 14:00-18:00
With a performance by Mathilde Chaize (The Very Last Gesture) at 18:00

PRESS KIT / DOSSIER DE PRESSE
BILINGUAL BOOKLET (ENG/FR)

Documented by © Fabrice Schneider

Avec le soutien de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, de la Région Bruxelles-Capitale/Image de Bruxelles

Luke Calzonetti
éditions la CAB/Charles Pigneul, Alan Jeuland & Brieuc Weulersse
Lars Herman Hegg
Julie Larrouy
Jacques Le Bourgeois
Anna Luz Pueyo
Sophie Martin
Rokko Miyoshi
Justin Sanchez
Marion Séhier

Thily Vossier

Luke Calzonetti éditions la CAB/Charles Pigneul, Alan Jeuland & Brieuc Weulersse Lars Herman HeggJulie LarrouyJacques Le Bourgeois Anna Luz Pueyo Sophie Martin Rokko Miyoshi Justin Sanchez Marion Séhier

Thily Vossier

Luke Calzonetti
éditions la CAB/Charles Pigneul, Alan Jeuland & Brieuc Weulersse
Lars Herman Hegg
Julie Larrouy
Jacques Le Bourgeois
Anna Luz Pueyo
Sophie Martin
Rokko Miyoshi
Justin Sanchez
Marion Séhier