Arcana Animi
29 August - 4 October, 2026.
Trio exhibition with Stephan Balkenhol and Clément Jacques-Vossen, at Barbé Gallery, Ghent, BE.
Who are we when every role falls away? And do these roles ever truly exist independently from who we are? Arcana Animi explores the hidden archetypes that shape identity. Not as fixed characteristics, but as shifting manifestations that continually emerge and recede. Some are consciously embraced, while others are assigned to us by those around us. Much like a hand of cards, different facets are revealed at different moments. No single card tells the whole story, yet together they begin to form a portrait of the individual.
In the sculptures of Stephan Balkenhol, the human figure appears as a timeless archetype. Stripped of a specific narrative, his figures exist somewhere between the personal and the universal. Rather than portraying particular individuals, they invite recognition of a shared human condition. William Ludwig Lutgens approaches identity from a different perspective. His characters inhabit a space between fiction and reality, revealing how identity is continually constructed through the roles we choose to perform and those imposed upon us. The everyday and the theatrical merge almost imperceptibly, exposing identity as something in constant negotiation. For Clément Jacques-Vossen, identity becomes a construct in which history, symbolism and collective memory converge. His figures evoke familiar presences that never fully disclose themselves, balancing between remembrance and imagination, between individual existence and a broader cultural narrative.
Together, the works of these three artists do not propose a singular definition of identity. Instead, they present a constellation of archetypes through which visitors may recognise fragments of themselves. Arcana Animi invites us to consider identity not as a fixed whole, but as a continuous interplay of personae, where each encounter reveals another hidden facet of the self.
