Kristof Santy presents new paintings and drawings at Sorry We're Closed in Brussels

KRISTOF SANTY
BOLERO
10 September - 24 October 2026
Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels

In September, the Brussels gallery Sorry We’re Closed is presenting BOLERO, a major new solo exhibition by Belgian artist Kristof Santy (b. 1987, Roeselare), unfolding across the gallery’s three floors.

Santy's second solo exhibition at the gallery brings together an entirely new body of work, including paintings, drawings and — for the first time — three-dimensional works on copper plates. A new publication accompanying the exhibition will further explore Santy’s evolving practice and recent developments.

The title BOLERO refers to Maurice Ravel’s iconic musical composition: a hypnotic and repetitive structure that slowly intensifies through rhythm, accumulation and variation until reaching an overwhelming climax. The reference is central to Santy’s approach to painting. Much like Ravel’s composition, Santy’s works are not primarily driven by narrative or subject matter, but by rhythm, repetition, structure, colour and formal relationships. Images unfold gradually through variations in pattern, scale, texture and composition.

Santy’s paintings often depict familiar subjects — flowers, dishes, interiors, tools, vehicles or fragments of everyday life — yet the works ultimately operate beyond representation. What appears immediately recognizable slowly transforms into something more enigmatic and emotionally charged. Through flattened perspectives, geometric constructions, saturated colours and subtle shifts in repetition, ordinary objects become monumental presences.

Rooted in folk traditions, anonymous popular painting and the history of Belgian modernism, Santy’s work balances naïveté and sophistication, directness and ambiguity. Echoes of Jean Brusselmans, Ensor, Joseph Willaert and Magritte resonate in his work, alongside affinities with Giorgio de Chirico or Konrad Klapheck. Yet for Santy, it is never about reference or nostalgia, but about painting as a living space for thought.

The exhibition also reflects a central aspect of Santy’s practice: the artist’s fascination with overlooked forms, forgotten objects and the poetry of the everyday. Santy approaches painting not as a vehicle for spectacle or commentary, but as a sustained act of attention. The artist has a deep fascination for modest things — ceramic chimney fragments, amateur paintings, flea market objects, devotional sculptures — elements that reappear transformed within his visual universe.

This attention to the ordinary is inseparable from the pleasure of painting itself. Santy builds his images slowly, layer by layer, allowing rhythm, colour and form to generate meaning beyond the depicted subject. His works oscillate between careful virtuosity and a deliberately fragile, almost hesitant naïveté. In this way, painting becomes less about describing reality and more about constructing its own autonomous reality.

Before dedicating himself fully to art, Santy worked in a factory and developed his artistic language largely through self-study. Since his international breakthrough in 2021, he has rapidly emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Belgian painting. His work has recently been presented in exhibitions including Painting after Painting at S.M.A.K. Ghent, F**klore at ABBY Kortrijk, Trans Europa Express at Kunsthaus NRW Aachen and Animalia at the Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna, alongside works by artists such as Picasso, Warhol, George Condo and Damien Hirst.

Selection of images

Exhibition text by Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte

Bolero

An ice cream sundae gleams before us: a glass dish filled with cream, fruit and biscuits, at once festive and orderly. Look more closely, and the dessert ceases to be a fleeting temptation, becoming instead a construction of circles, stripes, spheres and edges: a sequence that propels the eye upwards, only to send it back to the dish again and again. Just as Ravel, in his Bolero, repeats a single motif with almost stubborn insistence, each time making it heavier, fuller, more compelling, so these works allow colours, contours and patterns to swell into a slow crescendo of domestic things.

Kristof Santy paints a cucumber, a kiwi, pears, flowers, baskets, brushes, ice cream, lemonade, lighters, bicycles, keys, belts, glasses and pastries with a seriousness that at first seems carefree, but gradually becomes less innocent. The ordinary object is not liberated from its banality; it is fixed within it—frontal, enlarged, inescapable.

Santy’s contours are not merely graphic devices, neat outlines that make an image legible. Though they possess the visual pleasure of posters and shop displays, they are never purely decorative. They determine where an object ends and where the world is allowed to begin. The line protects, isolates, constrains. In a basket filled with carrots, tomatoes and blue grapes, each fruit or vegetable is set apart as though entitled to its own silence. Even the woven wicker of the basket, made from supple strips, acquires a solidity of its own. The contour lends dignity to what we pick up, eat, use or casually put back down.

In a series of new works, the logic of the contour is taken to its radical conclusion. During a residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum, Santy used copper etching plates not to make prints, but as surfaces into which he incised lines, painted and then cut out. The result is a series of shaped paintings in which the outer edge is no longer a frame, but part of the content itself. The object is not enclosed by its form; it speaks through that form, with the solemnity of an advertisement in a shop window. A key, belt or lighter, removed from its surroundings, changes character. A key only truly becomes a thing once it no longer needs to be used.

Here lies Santy’s rejection of trompe-l’œil. The still lifes of old sought to persuade the viewer that a grape could be plucked, that a glass stood waiting, cold to the touch, that a silver jug reflected the light all by itself. Where the classical still life often sought to make the artist’s hand disappear, Santy deliberately reveals the construction. In his work, almost the opposite occurs. The objects are recognisable yet emphatically constructed; their shine, shadow and volume are not intended to conceal the painting, but to reveal it. Flatness and illusion coexist, unreconciled.

Historically, subtle lines can be traced back to the Flemish kitchen pieces of Beuckelaer and Snijders and their market scenes, where abundance became a spectacle of possession, taste and mortality. The market scene was never merely an inventory; it was a worldview composed of baskets, knives, skins and hands. From this tradition, Santy takes the understanding that ordinary goods can sustain the gravity of a large format. He tempers Baroque abundance and reduces it to form.

He sets it frontally, flattens it, enlarges it to an almost comic monumentality. It is as though a seventeenth-century pantry had been placed inside a contemporary shop window.

A bouquet in a watering can, a shopping basket and a débardeur appear with the solemnity of a portrait. The human figure is absent, yet the sense of use remains palpable: the objects seem to appear just before or just after an action.

This tension between banal subject matter and rigorous composition lends Santy’s work a subtle unease. The painting Brushes brings this duality closest to the painter himself. The brushes are subject, tool and confession all at once. Their bristles, handles, metal ferrules and traces of paint form a meta-self-portrait without a face, an inventory of labour masquerading as a still life.

Santy’s series of drawings Cours de Dessin does not constitute a set of preparatory studies for the paintings. The drawings speak in a thinner voice of their own. Pencil and wax reveal design and completion simultaneously: the tentative measuring line remains visible beside the firm contour. As a result, the object does not become more spontaneous, but more vulnerable in its construction.

Perhaps that is the melancholy of Bolero: everything remains recognisable, but nothing returns as it was.

Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte