Bendt Eyckermans' exhibition is rooted in a specific philosophical question: that of the "block universe", a theory according to which past, present and future coexist simultaneously in physical reality.
Time is not an arrow but a space. In this framework, free will is only an illusion of movement within a trajectory already traced, and it is this idea that the canvases make visible, one by one.
The horse, the exhibition's central motif, returns as an inherited rather than chosen emblem. In A box filled with a thousand horses (2025), dozens of equestrian figurines—toys, statuettes, carousel horses—are piled high against a dark red background, like the spilled contents of an overflowing memory. Accumulation becomes a language: these are not horses we are looking at, but objects that have passed through generations before ending up there, stacked high.
release, 2026, Oil on linen canvas, 184 x 160 x 2.5 cm
A single equestrian figure, A horse , drawn in charcoal on a pink tarpaulin in front of a Brussels facade, is enough elsewhere to evoke the same imagery: in a work where the motif of the horse, reduced to a simple outline, stands out on a crumpled fabric which masks and reveals at the same time, as if the ancestor remained there, hindered, under the canvas.
The omnipresent architecture acts as a second body. In The Terrace (2025), a gilded statuette, Christ-like or martyred and pierced by arrows, stands on a column at the edge of a terrace. Between a tree and a chair, a bottle and a cigarette butt lie abandoned on the ground: this domestic reliquary, an improvised altar, is placed in an ordinary garden.
The Pole (The Father) (2025) revisits this device of the pedestal and the figure, this time wrapped in blue plastic fabric, like an object being moved, protected, in transit between two places—a way of saying that even figures are transported and handled like furniture. Monument (2025), on the other hand, presents a winged silhouette perched on a column, under a stormy sky illuminated by a shaft of light, an almost heraldic motif that reminds us that the monument, in this work, is never far from ruin.
The pole (The father), 2025, Oil on linen canvas, 85 x 65 x 2.5 cm
The labyrinth motif, central to the artist's accompanying text, finds its most literal translation in A Maze (2025): a stone obelisk rises at the center of closing walls, seen from above, like an isometric video game from the 1980s, a direct echo of the screenshots from text-based adventure games that punctuate the exhibition booklet. It also appears in Manhole (2026), where lines intersect in a material that one imagines to be concrete, here rendered in bronze. They are tightly packed, dark, and oppressive.
The human figure, when it appears, is almost always seen from behind, or withdrawn into itself. The Quiet Man (2025) shows a person kneeling before a television broadcasting a green landscape crossed by a horseman. It is a mise en abyme of the equestrian motif, now recycled into a domestic image. But between two marble columns, a reminder that even the bourgeois interior is an architecture of memory. Monuments (2026) reprises the posture of the figures with their backs turned, here still admiring a majestic horse, legs in the air.
monuments, 2026, Oil on linen canvas, 183 x 134 x 2.5 cm
The sculptural echo of this scene is found literally in Buried Relic (2026), a piece in painted resin placed directly on reclaimed wooden planks: a folded human body, its head held in multiple hands, as if exhumed or a relic offered as a sacrifice. The interpretation is open; the title guides us.
Finally, the objects themselves carry their own symbolic weight. Ringbearer (2025) frames two hands, one passing numerous rings to the other, a gesture of transmission. Unboxing (2025) arranges open boxes around a barely sketched, almost erased silhouette, perhaps as if unpacking an inheritance were tantamount to making the benefactor disappear. And Cosmic (2025), entirely in black, superimposes several profiles that double from a single point of light: the most abstract image in the exhibition, but also the most faithful to the block universe theory: several moments of the same face, coexisting on the same sheet.
Unboxing, 2025, Oil on paper, 31 x 23 cm
The Carrier, 2025, Oil on linen canvas, 183 x 134 cm
The Carrier does not seek to answer the question of determinism. He seeks to paint it, object by object, pedestal by pedestal, until the house, the street, the sky become rooms in the same inherited labyrinth. For, as the artist himself says: death has something to do with the living.
The Carrier , Bendt Eyckermans.
Carlos/Ishikawa, Unit 4, 88 Mile End Road, London E1 4UN.
Until July 18, 2026.
