Dubbele Huid / Double Skin
January 10 - February 14, 2026, Christian Ouwens Gallerie

Dubbele Huid / Double Skin starts from skin as boundary and contact surface: paint-skin and paper-skin, facial skin, a butterfly's wing, glass-like surface, cloth, and veil. The works move through a twilight zone between appearing and disappearing, object and subject, self and other. A choreography of thresholds: gestures that point toward inside and outside.

A subliminal desire to probe them runs through the exhibition. It is structurally erotic: slit, wound, membrane. Yet even as we move closer, intimacy does not yield a deeper “inside.” The gaze is redirected back to the surface, now intensified, in a looping gesture.

Across these works, motifs return in second forms, producing micro-shifts: echo, afterimage, repetition, inversion. What first seems fixed tilts into something else. A cut can read as both slit and smile; an enclosure can also read as void. Portraits are not autobiographical in content, but in structure: the image surfaces, withdraws, repeats, returns altered, like memory or self-perception.

Each work carries a second aspect, as if another image were nested in the first. This second skin is not a layer you uncover; it is a mode of seeing that keeps generating another version. You come closer, and the surface shifts by a fraction. The klein bottles lend the exhibition its topological logic: inside and outside appear as effects of a single fold. One living skin, slightly shifted.

It has an almost Beckettian refusal: even if you pierce, you don't arrive. Meaning does not reside behind the image; it lives in the gap where approach turns into return.

Working wall / reference constellation
Klein bottle — schematic drawing; Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) — Rückenfigur; Francisco de Zurbarán, The Veil of Veronica (c. 1630s); Lucio Fontana — Concetto spaziale (late 1950s–60s); Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1601–02); “cutting” drawing (own sketch).

Dubbele Huid / Double Skin
January 10 - February 14, 2026, Christian Ouwens Gallerie

“…and I in the middle, that is perhaps what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on one side the outside, on the other side the inside, which can be as thin as a blade, I am on neither one side nor the other; I am in the middle, I am the partition, I have two surfaces and no thickness…”
Samuel Beckett

About the exhibition
In my studio there is a wall I think of as an epistemological wall: a place where the wish to “get behind” an image keeps meeting the fact of a surface. Veils, cuts, turned backs, looped shapes, each gesture approaches entry, then turns the encounter back toward the viewer. Touch appears as incision, proof, or desire; vision pauses, hesitates, repeats.

Dubbele Huid / Double Skin starts from skin as boundary and contact surface: paint-skin and paper-skin, facial skin, a butterfly's wing, glass-like surface, cloth, and veil. The works move through a twilight zone between appearing and disappearing, object and subject, self and other. A choreography of thresholds: gestures that point toward inside and outside.

A subliminal desire to probe them runs through the exhibition. It is structurally erotic: slit, wound, membrane. Yet even as we move closer, intimacy does not yield a deeper “inside.” The gaze is redirected back to the surface, now intensified, in a looping gesture.

The exhibition is built in clouds and series. On entering, forms press close to the skin: a sliding shape that can be wing or profile; a dark hole tipping toward pore, pupil, eclipse; legs dissolving into violet; a thorned branch bending back on itself. The sequence flows into the Klein Bottles—glass-like loops—and then, when you turn, toward face and paper: in the Vellums, hand, sheet, back, and portrait overlap and pierce; nearby, the Turning Portraits keep faces only just present, almost absorbed into the surface.

Downstairs, an X-ray head rises from light. Two canvases hang like sheets—screen or void—marked by a soft cut. At the end stands the large green Klein Bottle, part column, part organ; opposite, a phallus lingers as a faint violet echo.

Across these works, motifs return in second forms, producing micro-shifts: echo, afterimage, repetition, inversion. What first seems fixed tilts into something else. A cut can read as both slit and smile; an enclosure can also read as void. Portraits are not autobiographical in content, but in structure: the image surfaces, withdraws, repeats, returns altered—like memory or self-perception.

Each work carries a second aspect, as if another image were nested within the first. This second skin is not a layer you uncover; it is a mode of seeing that keeps generating another version. The image answers approach: you come closer, and the surface shifts by a fraction. The klein bottles lend the exhibition its topological logic: inside and outside appear as effects of a single fold. One living skin, slightly shifted.

In the background, it is almost Beckettian: even if you pierce, you don't arrive. Meaning does not reside behind the image; it lives in the gap where approach turns into return.

Working wall / reference constellation
Klein bottle — schematic drawing; Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) — Rückenfigur; Francisco de Zurbarán, The Veil of Veronica (c. 1630s); Lucio Fontana — Concetto spaziale (late 1950s–60s); Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1601–02); “cutting” drawing (own sketch).