Group show
The Veil is Thin
20.9.2025 - 5.10.2025 | Brussels
At its heart, photography is an act of revelation. For artists Ilan Weiss, Sophie Vanhomwegen and Toha De Brant, it is also an act of concealment. Each devoted to exploring the transitional space between what is shown and what is kept hidden. Their work challenges the very definition of photography, dissolving the image into the textured feel of painting, the play of illusion, and the immediacy of sensory experience. One abstracts the gaze, another fractures the body into intimate fragments, a third seeks a primordial unity with nature.
The title, The Veil is Thin, anchors the exhibition. It borrows from spiritual traditions that speak of moments - when the boundary between the material and the ethereal softens, allowing passage between worlds. This idea connects all the works, made visible through blur, mask, and shadow. They engage directly with the paradox noted by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott: that artists are driven by the twin urges to communicate and to conceal. Their imagery is a quest toward growth, moving from a need for control toward a state of acceptance. Letting go becomes a method to reinvent and transform.
The exhibition is anchored by three pairings that form a continuous cycle of inquiry into the human condition. Ilan & Sophie both explore the persona as a fragile construction. Their work traces the masks worn for performance and protection, examining the fine line where a celebration of self becomes an escape from it. Between them, a palpable tension hangs : a weight suspended between pleasure and decay, between the urgency of being seen and the ease of being lost. This investigation of the self shifts outward with Toha & Ilan, who pursue a dissolution of the individual into the environment. Their intention calls for a reconnection to primal, elemental forces, reimagining the body not as a separate entity, but as fluid water, raw earth, and organic matter. The cycle completes its return to the intimate through Sophie & Toha, who map a topography of the sensuous and the unspoken. Zooming in on the body, they treat sensuality not as spectacle but as a private language, giving form to deeply buried desires.
The Veil Is Thin is an invitation to lean in closer, to look beyond the surface, and to consider what resonates in the quiet space between seeing and sensing.
