“Through the darkness of future’s past, the magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds… Fire walk with me…” – David Lynch

Barbara Hoogeweegen rips apart the distance between the observer and the artwork with this quote by David Lynch. She calls for a mental exercise, a first imaginary scenario connecting, as a prelude, two worlds whose concrete existence we cannot be certain of. Through her works, the artist captures fleeting fragments of time charged with abstract sensations, moments of utmost delicacy in which we find ourselves face to face with our own vulnerability. They are moments overshadowed by that intangible universe of emotions which, for some strange reason, we tend to sweep under the rug, or else lock away inside a hermetic box. There is a silent sharing of states of mind. In her works, a melancholy takes shape that has become familiar to us today, almost pleasant: a slightly unsettling feeling, yet a profoundly human one. It is the same ambiguous warmth we find in her palette; a chromatic contrast that embodies one of the most human foundations: the ambivalence between intimacy and disturbance, between what attracts us and what, at the same time, makes us uncomfortable. There is an implicit discourse within her practice, a reality we continue to swallow like a pill while neglecting its side effects: the struggle against emotional anaesthesia. Hyper-digitalisation seems to have handed us a form of apparent emotional dysfunction: we feel uncomfortable, almost at fault, when our feelings overwhelm us. And yet, our difficulty in inhabiting the emotional sphere corresponds to an ever-deepening sensitivity. It is precisely at this threshold that Barbara’s work takes its place: within that solitary fragility and, at the same time, deeply shared fragility. When is it that we truly allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to let go? It is at night. It is the dark part. Perhaps because, in the shadows, everything seems able to pass unnoticed, or to be permitted; or perhaps because it is the only moment when what exists outside of us manages to align perfectly with what we carry within.

Into the night.

Hence the title of the exhibition, and hence the red thread connecting the works, the setting, and the references. The exhibition space is, in fact, an ancient 19th-century townhouse, with the works distributed across three floors. The interior evokes a noir speakeasy, where reality begins to dissolve and where the night feeds what vanishes by morning. Dynamic strokes and broad fields of colour emphasise the fleetingness of these moments, constructing a dimension that moves between Lynchian cinematography and the solitude Degas captured in front of that little glass of absinthe. Night and music move arm in arm like sisters, one pulling the other towards alienation from real life. In keeping with this concept, the exhibition is accompanied by a soundtrack curated by John-Paul Pryor of The Sirens of Titan, moving through jazz tones and unsettling notes. Here, the night is represented as an alluring carousel, a reinterpretation of the land of toys. Into the night is the escape route that nevertheless reveals a darkness behind the curtain, a circus of emotions more real than we think.