Magazine
17 march 2026, Yves Joris
This exhibition says nothing – which is exactly why you should go: The Quiet Between Things at the Eva Steynen Gallery
The Quiet Between Things, EVA STEYNEN GALLERY
A visit to The Quiet Between Things at the Eva Steynen Gallery
The city is too loud. Not just today, not just here. All cities are structurally, chronically, constitutionally too loud. We move through it like fish in water that’s too warm: we no longer notice it, yet it exhausts us. But then there is a gallery on Zurenborgstraat that is holding an exhibition about silence. Not about the concept of silence nor about silence as a statement, but about the small, fragile, indispensable space between things. I walked inside with the city still ringing in my ears. I walked out again with something I can only describe as inner calm.
The door closes and the air changes
The Eva Steynen Gallery is presenting three artists: ceramicist Veroniek Van Samang (b. 1988) and painters Chris Meulemans (b. 1967) and Ann Grillet (b. 1961). The title of the exhibition, The Quiet Between Things, reveals nothing. It describes an attitude, a way of being in the world that we have unlearned because it produces nothing, yields nothing, shares nothing. To me, the silence between things is not the silence of absence, but the silence of a presence that does not impose itself. It is precisely the kind of silence that a gallery like this allows to exist in a city that does its best to push it aside.
The three artists work in different media across a generational gap of nearly 30 years. And yet something connects them, something Steynen has seen clearly and arranged with care: a shared trust in the power of the understated. None of the three is trying to prove anything. None is trying to persuade. They offer. The viewer decides.
Ann Grillet, Rising Blue, 2019, EVA STEYNEN GALLERY
Three voices, one breath
Ann Grillet works in layers. Not as a technique, but as a form of thinking. Her abstract canvases are sediments of time. Dozens of thin brushstrokes, each a day or a moment or a hesitation, accumulate until the surface resembles a relief map of silence. You are not looking at an image, but a process that decided to suddenly stop. There is always a moment when Grillet decides it is enough. Not because it is finished in the conventional sense, but because adding more would destroy something that is still breathing.
That moment of stopping — the decision not to go any further — may be the most underestimated gesture in contemporary art. In a culture that rewards more, faster and louder, the artist who withdraws her hand at exactly the right moment is rare. Grillet is one such artist. Her canvases demand patience and repay it with interest to anyone willing to wait.
Nearby hang the floral paintings of Chris Meulemans and the pairing is no coincidence. Whereas Grillet begins with abstraction and gradually allows something tangible to emerge, Meulemans starts with the recognisable — the flower — and slowly lets it dissolve into rhythm and colour. Her paintings hover in a zone between recognition and abstraction, a zone that could feel uneasy but does not. Her work feels familiar, like a word in a language you once spoke and have all but forgotten.
Chris Meulemans, Vanishing Vista, 2023, EVA STEYNEN GALLERY
Meulemans paints flowers that are no longer flowers. Or rather, flowers that are more than flowers. Botanical reality is her point of departure, not her destination. What remains after her transformation is a chromatic cadence — a rhythm of warm and cool tones, a repetition that becomes meditative without ever turning monotonous. You look and something in your body begins to settle. Not because the work is calm, but because it takes over your rhythm and slows it down.
And then there are the sculptures by Veroniek Van Samang. While Grillet and Meulemans work on the surface, Van Samang brings the body into the room. Her ceramic objects are three-dimensional paintings, tactile beings that merge colour and vulnerability within the fired material itself. She trained as a painter, but clay has given her something canvas could not: gravity, fragility, the physical memory of hands. You see the pressure of fingers. You see the decisions. You see how an object proudly carries its own vulnerability.
What struck me most was the interaction between the three. Not the sum of three individual practices, but a shared breath, a conversation already under way before I walked in. Grillet commences something. Meulemans sets it in motion. Van Samang gives it weight and volume. Or the other way round, depending on how you move through the space. The exhibition has no beginning and no end, only entrances.
Veroniek Van Samang, Behind the fence II, 2024, EVA STEYNEN GALLERY
What the Japanese knew and we forgot
There is a word in Japanese that has no satisfying translation, which is precisely why it is so useful: ma. It means something like a meaningful interval. You might describe it as the pause between two notes that makes music possible, the silence between two sentences that allows a conversation breathe or the emptiness in a room that makes the presence of objects visible in the first place. Ma is not the absence of something, but the presence of space.
In traditional Japanese architecture, ma is deliberately created and protected. A room is not full when every surface has been used. A room is only full when the space within it no longer has air. Western interiors, Western museums, Western exhibitions tend towards the opposite: fill the wall, occupy the floor, comment on every work with an extensive label. More is more, because more proves that you are taking things seriously.
The Quiet Between Things is based on a different premise. The works of art hang and stand with space around them. They breathe. And that breathing space is not a luxury or a waste, but a necessary condition under which the work can speak. Without ma there is no dialogue, without silence no conversation.
Restraint as a radical gesture
There is something uncanny about work that refuses to persuade. That does not shout, does not claim, does not demand to be seen, but waits until you are ready to look. In an era of maximum visibility — algorithms, the attention economy, the aesthetic violence of the constant stream of images — restraint becomes an act. Not of weakness, but of trust — the trust that the viewer has enough in front of them already, provided they are willing to slow down and truly see.
Grillet, Meulemans and Van Samang each practise that restraint in their own way. They do not explain, but simply exist, with a patience that can feel almost embarrassing to anyone who enters with an overfilled schedule. And perhaps that is the most subtle thing this exhibition does: it makes you aware of your own inner noise.
Not here. Here you have to do the work yourself.
I stood for a long time in front of a painting by Grillet whose title I could not recall afterwards. That seemed the best proof that the exhibition had succeeded: the label does not matter. What matters is the silence it created in me — the ma I carried back outside, into the city, where the trams were still running and no one knew. But I knew. I carried that quiet interval with me for a while, like something precious wrapped in a coat that was far too loud.
Go. Not because you should, but because afterwards, you will realise you needed it.
THE ART COUCH
THE INNER LANDSCAPES OF ANN GRILLET
By Annelies Vanbelle
One on one, you one with the work, that's how her mental landscapes are best savoured. The longer you stay for the work, the more it unfolds, the more it shows itself, the more layers and intriguing details you discover. Whether it's midnight blue that tends to deep black or a palette of extroverted cadmium yellow, each canvas invites you to an intimate dialogue. You experience very strongly in her work what intense impact colours can have on us.
It is sometimes fifteen to twenty layers of thinly spread acrylic or oil paint, usually starting with a very bright colour and often ending in rather dark or muted tones. A game of surfaces, lines, dots, spheres, drips — the artist likes to play with the formal alphabet of abstract painting, yet the end result is very calm and harmonious. You could call it aesthetic, if it weren't for the fact that there is always something that wrings. At the same time there is a desire to purify, to arrive at an essence, and a counterforce that generates enough friction in every work.
Accidental coincidences
The logical illogic of each work keeps the viewer going, the accidental coincidences, which Ann Grillet consciously responds to. At the start of a work she usually has a plan, an atmosphere or a feeling or a colour that she wants to place centrally, but gradually the work takes over and she is guided by what presents itself. To then intervene again when it feels necessary. The whole process is often very visible at the edges of her works, where the paint accumulates layer after layer of multi-coloured paint. She herself likes to compare it with the music form free jazz, in which people have some idea of where they want to go, but in the end still spontaneously arrive at a new and surprising whole.
They are works that you must experience, that you may experience. They want you to sit down for a while. At first glance you may have the feeling that very little is happening, only to discover that a lot is actually happening. The density of meaning systematically increases the longer you engage; the field of tension grows as long as you keep looking.
Colourist
Ann Grillet is intrigued by how colours interact and enter into a dialogue with each other. That is why she remains committed to abstraction, because this is the ideal playing field for her very own language. Always fascinated by landscapes, by looking differently from the others and perhaps seeing more, by looking inside too, through windows to peeling or broken walls or through our inner window. You can see her works as mental spaces in which you can walk around. They play on your inner landscape and take you along.
Each work by Ann Grillet is a mystery, but its possible heaviness is lifted by the obvious pleasure of painting, the playful additions and shapes, the vital colours that you discover through the layering and in the margins of each canvas. The transparency means that you are simultaneously drawn into each work, but are still left very free in your interpretation.
Her now fully blossoming oeuvre offers you a very sensory, tactile experience, which invites you to a quiet place far away from the hectic world, where formal simplicity shows itself in all its seductiveness.
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De innerlijke landschapen van Ann Grillet
Eén op één, jij één met het werk, zo worden haar mentale landschappen het best gedegusteerd. Hoe langer je voor het werk verblijft, hoe meer het zich ontvouwt, hoe meer er zich toont, hoe meer lagen en intrigerende details je ontdekt. Of het nu nachtblauw is dat neigt naar diepzwart of een palet van extravert cadmiumgeel, elk doek nodigt je uit tot een intieme dialoog. Heel sterk ervaar je in haar werk welke intense impact kleuren op ons kunnen hebben.
Het zijn soms vijftien à twintig lagen, dun gesmeerde acryl of olieverf, te beginnen met meestal een hele felle kleur en vaak eindigend in veeleer donkere of gedempte tonen. Een spel van vlakken, lijnen, stippen, bollen, druipers — de kunstenares bespeelt graag het vormelijke alfabet van de abstracte schilderkunst, maar toch is het eindresultaat heel rustig en harmonieus. Esthetisch zou je het kunnen noemen, ware het niet dat er steeds ook iets is wat wringt. Er is tegelijk een verlangen naar uitpuren, naar uitkomen bij een essentie, en een tegenkracht die genoeg frictie genereert in elk werk.
Ontoevallige toevalligheden
De logische onlogica van elk werk houdt de kijker gaande, de ontoevallige toevalligheden, waar Ann Grillet bewust op inspeelt. Bij de aanvang van een werk heeft ze meestal een plan, een sfeer of een gevoel of een kleur dat ze centraal wil plaatsen, maar gaandeweg neemt het werk het over en laat ze zich leiden door wat zich aandient. Om dan weer in te grijpen wanneer het nodig voelt. Dat hele proces is vaak heel zichtbaar aan de randjes van haar werken, waar de verf zich laag na laag veelkleurig ophoopt. Ze vergelijkt het zelf graag met de muziekvorm free jazz, waarbij men enigszins een idee heeft waar men naartoe wil, maar uiteindelijk toch spontaan tot een nieuw en verrassend geheel komt.
Het zijn werken die je moet ondergaan, die je mag ondergaan. Ze verlangen dat je er even voor gaat zitten. Op het eerste gezicht heb je misschien het gevoel dat er heel weinig gebeurt, om gaandeweg te ontdekken dat er net heel veel gebeurt. De densiteit van de betekenis neemt stelselmatig toe hoe langer je je engageert; het spanningsveld groeit aan zolang je blijft kijken.
Colorist
Hoe kleuren op elkaar inwerken en met elkaar in dialoog gaan, intrigeert Ann Grillet. Daarom blijft ze toegewijd aan de abstractie, omdat dit het ideale speelveld is voor haar geheel eigen taal. Altijd al gefascineerd door landschappen, door anders kijken dan de anderen en misschien meer zien, door naar binnen kijken ook, doorheen ramen naar afgebladderde of afgebroken muren of doorheen ons innerlijke venster. Je kunt haar werken zien als mentale ruimtes, waarin je kunt rondwandelen. Ze bespelen je innerlijke landschap en nemen je mee.
Elk werk van Ann Grillet is een mysterie, maar de mogelijke zwaarte ervan wordt opgeheven door het overduidelijke schilderplezier, de speelse toevoegingen en vormen, de vitale kleuren die je doorheen de gelaagdheid en in de kantlijnen van elk canvas ontdekt. De transparantie maakt dat je tegelijk in elk werk gezogen wordt, maar toch heel vrij wordt gelaten in je interpretatie.
Haar nu volop openbloeiende oeuvre biedt je een heel zintuiglijke, tactiele ervaring, die je even uitnodigt naar een stille plek ver weg van de hectische wereld, waar vormelijke eenvoud zich toont in zijn volle verleidelijkheid.
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