Odysseys

Odysseys is Cédric Van Parys’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, marking his recent move to Brussels—following periods of living and working in Shanghai, Rotterdam, Sofia, and Chicago. The exhibition at KBK introduces recent artistic explorations in sculpture, photography, and installation, which move between microhistorical readings of place and speculative inquiries into infrastructures as spaces of promise.

With an interest in tectonics, gravity, weight, and matter, Van Parys simultaneously engages with movement, traveling, and exploration. Whether reimagining billboards as sacred portals in Chicago, observing traces of aerial highways above Brussels, or balancing industrial precision with raw, organic form, he appropriates, rearranges, or juxtaposes existing materials or symbols in ways that re-code the familiar, suggesting alternative readings of the natural and human-made world.

Abstract visual forms give the impression that they inhabit a non-anthropocentric plane, yet they challenge the narrative embedded in material culture typical of the Anthropocene. While urging a reevaluation of how we interact with symbols both past and present, Van Parys’s work manages to extract a spiritual essence hidden within the stone and steel of industrial structures and infrastructures.

As the title suggests, Odysseys points to travel. However, no archetypal mythical figures—no Ulysses, Calypso, or Penelope—lurk here; instead, the exhibition presents odysseys of ideas, materials, and forms that, displaced from their usual environments, settle only momentarily in the gallery space in a state of arrested potential. The exhibition, a conversation between hard matter, movement, and ritual, invites a contemplative stance, suggesting a potent tension between a poetic sensibility and a critical post-capitalist message that is just about visible on the horizon.