Rinus Van de Velde: Loud Echoes

Gallery Baton proudly presents Loud Echoes, a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde (b. 1983), from 19 November to 24 December 2025. Coming on the heels of 2024 solo exhibitions at Art Sonje Center and the Jeonnam Museum of Art that drew great acclaim from critics and art lovers, this exhibition features charcoal drawings modeled on the artist himself, oil pastel drawings along with a new sculpture series. It further cements Van de Velde’s identity as an artist whose creations are rooted in the virtual and the real, imitation and hybridity, and the probabilities associated with parallel universes.

Van de Velde’s two previous solo exhibitions at Gallery Baton showed him to be an adventurous artist who does not shy away from working in multiple media and whose efforts to combine diverse media such as painting, film, installation, and sculpture have seen him progressing toward a single plot that is loosely woven yet consistent. His various selves, each taking shape with its own persona and roles, experience unique lives within their respective narrative worlds, in a development that manifests in timely ways through the media of film, painting, and sculpture. In the process, Van de Velde has shown who he is and where his interests lie, densely crafting a unique worldview with few precedents.

The artist’s two-dimensional work is frequently characterized by its use of a two-tiered structure of image and text. In addition to being a standard layout feature familiar to us from newspapers, magazines, and other media, this is also a way to maintain a deliberate distance from the kind of objective truth that such media have conventionally ensured. His assertion that we trust in images too readily suggests that these adapted layouts are used in his work as a device to allow for the free blurring of reality and fiction. Intriguingly, an important clue toward understanding his artistic stance can be found in Gerhard Richter(b. 1932)’s comments about his own painting style: “What I’m attempting in each picture is nothing other than this . . . to bring together, in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom.”