An exhibition devoted to the Ostend artist Léon Spilliaert has opened at Villa Empain in Brussels under the title "Soleil Noir," Belga Share reports. The show is staged by the Boghossian Foundation and takes its name and framing from a line of poetry by Gérard de Nerval. According to Belga Share, the display gathers close to a hundred works and spans more than 130 years of artistic creation.
Louma Salamé, director of the Boghossian Foundation, explained the reference at the heart of the project. She cited Nerval's verse in which the speaker calls himself the shadowy one, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine in his ruined tower, and describes his lute as bearing "the Black Sun of Melancholy," Belga Share reports.
Why it matters
The exhibition places Spilliaert's own output — around thirty pieces — in direct conversation with work by his contemporaries and by artists of later generations. Belga Share names James Ensor, Constant Permeke, Edgar Tytgat, George Minne and Henry Van de Velde among the peers brought into dialogue with him. From more recent decades, the show draws on Luc Tuymans, Thierry De Cordier, Hans Op de Beeck, Michaël Borremans and Wim Delvoye.
That structure turns the exhibition into an argument about lineage as much as a retrospective. Rather than isolating Spilliaert, it treats his preoccupations as a thread running through Belgian art across more than a century, and asks visitors to read the older works against the newer ones.
From spleen to serenity
According to Belga Share, the exhibition opens on Spilliaert's darker, more ghostly territory. Among the early works is a Chinese ink wash titled "Woman by the Canal Opposite the Pier at Sunset," a piece the report describes as evoking solitude and melancholy.
The arrangement then shifts as visitors pass through the galleries. Belga Share reports that the sense of spleen gradually gives way to calm, and shadow to light, allowing the many sides of the artist to emerge over the course of the visit.
The hang is organised into thematic chapters. Belga Share lists them as The Shadowy One, Friendships, The Fountain, The Queen of the Beaches, Dreams of the Horizon, Outdoors, Indoors, Self-Portrait, Nudes, and Black Sun. Each chapter groups works around a distinct strand of the artist's practice rather than following a strict chronology.
The show concludes with the stanzas of Arno's song "Oostende Bonsoir," described by Belga Share as a tribute to the artist's handling of chiaroscuro. In the lyric quoted in the report, the singer says Spilliaert lights up the seawall each evening "in the colours of nostalgia, in the colours of despair."
Visitors planning a trip can find further practical details through the Boghossian Foundation, which is presenting the exhibition at Villa Empain.