The exhibition brings together two artists who did not know each other, Bernd Lohaus and Rui Chafes. The latter discovered the work of his elder following a visit to the Grand Hornu and the reading of a conversation between Bernd Lohaus and Denis Gielen, leading the idea of this small exhibition where important works, sculptures and drawings, of these two artists will be presented. If, at first glance, their work differs, several points nevertheless connect them.

Historically rooted in Fluxus and minimal art, Bernd Lohaus's works are in a way vulnerable. By embracing the found personality of wood, without directly referencing it, his sculptures are imbued with meaning through minimal intervention. Prepositions, nouns, or fragments of sentences sometimes adorn the extremely heavy presence of the ash-colored pieces, providing clues about possible relationships. Although heavy and static, the arrangement of Lohaus's sculptures implies a potential for movement: wooden beams are placed in a way that suggests a possible rearrangement. The pieces are not attached to each other, but stacked or placed freely, which adds to their internal tension. Bien qu’elle soit lourde et statique, la disposition des sculptures de Lohaus implique un potentiel de mouvement : des poutres en bois sont placées d’une manière qui propose un réarrangement potentiel. Les pièces ne sont pas attachées les unes aux autres, mais empilées ou posées librement, ce qui ajoute à leur tension interne.

The enigmatic and mysterious sculptures of Rui Chafes are almost always made of iron, painted black, with an extraordinary consistency and rigor that, to paraphrase the artist, are shadows or negatives of a world that traps emptiness, silence in its most absolute form: cocoons, nests, insects, armor, masks, or elements of clothing represent both a memory and a skin that protect and testify to an absent body. In essence, Chafes seeks to reach immateriality and represent the invisible, challenging the limits of iron and the weightless.

Bernd Lohaus was born in Düsseldorf in 1940 and passed away in Antwerp in 2010. In 1965, he founded the Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp with his wife Anny De Decker (until 1976). After starting with Fluxus-style Happenings, he made his international artistic debut in 1969 at the exhibition When attitudes become form by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle in Bern. Lohaus's work has been presented in international institutions, most recently at the Skulpturenhalle Neuss (2019) and at the Palazzo Grassi, Punta Della Dogana, Venice (2020).

Rui Chafes was born in Lisbon in 1966. Between 1990 and 1992, he studied with Gerhard Merz at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. During this stay, immersed in German culture, he translated Fragments by Novalis into Portuguese. He began an international career early on, representing Portugal at the Venice Biennale (in 1995 with José Pedro Croft and Pedro Cabrita Reis) and then at the São Paulo Biennale (in 2004, in a project with dancer and choreographer Vera Mantero). Several of his sculptures are now in important public collections. In 2004, he received the Robert-Jacobsen Sculpture Prize from the Würth Foundation in Germany, the Pessoa Prize in Portugal in 2015, and the AICA Prize in 2021.