Steel sun
Inside the stone-floored house, boredom stands at the window. On the table, it first notices a glass still bearing the trace of a mouth. A peach has split open by itself in the fruit bowl and draws two flies that keep returning to the same spot. In a vase, the flowers slowly bend toward water gone cloudy. A chair remains pulled out as though someone had just stood up, but no one will ever return. The next day, almost nothing has changed.
But a few minutes after it decides to look elsewhere, the man rises. Bugles echo through the valley. Near the door, he finds his swollen boots, pulls them on without cleaning them, and screws a steel sun over his face. He makes his way down toward the clearing. It was a small rejoicing, almost ridiculous, this return among things. With dogs, spears, horns, and all the equipment required to rediscover the natural order from which one had so carefully separated for so long.
An animal must flee so that man can pursue it, a horse must run in his place so that he may experience speed, and he must enter the forest armed in order to believe himself returned among the beasts. Each plays its part with admirable seriousness. The stag will be wild, the dog faithful, the horse brave, and man, for a morning, will pretend to have found his place again. Then, when the time comes to return, one chooses from the remains a fragment beautiful enough to be spared from oblivion. A head, antlers, a hide. It is carried back inside and hung above the fireplace. There it remains, watching over meals, evening gatherings, days that stretch too long and conversations that slowly exhaust themselves, until one morning the bugles sound once again.
In Brussels, Espace Intermédiaire is presenting AnimaL, an exhibition by Béla Zoltán bringing together paintings and sculptures. Opened on September 24 as part of Brussels Art Square, it runs until October 25, 2026. Beneath the immediate presence of these forms lies a broader question of time and of the place each being occupies in the world. Figures appear at radically different scales, sometimes reduced to a silhouette, sometimes enlarged to an almost monumental presence. As the eye moves through the exhibition, a sense of uncertainty gradually settles in: what still belongs to the world, what remains only as a trace, and what seems, on the contrary, to escape it altogether?
This uncertainty begins with a very tangible fascination for things, but inevitably leads toward the question of essence. To question things is already to speak of the soul, whose presence can sometimes be felt most clearly in contact with what appears to have been deprived of it.
The unease does not come from death itself, but from the impossibility of deciding whether anything here was ever truly alive. These figures have already left the realm of simple representation without ever fully entering a state of being. They seem embalmed in an intermediate state, held in a kind of stasis where the body is preserved even as its unity begins to dissolve. Anatomies recombine and hybridise into forms that come close to life without ever quite reaching it.
Elsewhere, stillness suddenly takes on a threatening charge. A bird faces a snake, a cat watches the birds, while carcasses remain caught in snow-covered forests. Nothing truly moves, yet everything seems capable of shifting from one moment to the next. The tension no longer lies in action itself. It circulates through glances, distances, and the silent interval between what is staring down and what might be seized. It is from this contradiction between what could happen and the objective stillness of the scene, where nothing actually does, that a sense of the Unheimliche emerges. Pursuit, attack and escape exist only in the viewer’s mind, as though the image had displaced beyond itself everything it refuses to show.
When movement stops, gesture gradually ceases to belong to a specific situation. It is no longer merely the consequence of a moment or an action. It becomes a form that the eye can isolate, identify and read again. Inertia gives the body an almost spiritual depth. It allows form to detach itself from the event and enter something more lasting. Gesture is no longer simply something performed at a given instant. It becomes a figure capable of reappearing elsewhere, in another time or another image, while retaining part of its meaning. It is at this point that the being begins to become a sign.
At the centre of it all, the visitor moves forward. The snow within the frames seems almost to spill onto the white walls, extending the landscape beyond the image. One has to search. Look up into the branches, return to the ground, inspect the corners, peer behind the rocks. Little by little, the visit begins to resemble a hunt.
Following the trail, the landscape starts to repeat itself differently. The works no longer appear as isolated scenes but begin to answer one another across time. What first seemed whole reappears elsewhere as a carcass, then again in spectral form. The exhibition becomes a scattered chronology with no fixed order, in which one gradually recognises what had already appeared under another guise. Carcasses and remnants cease to be separate motifs and become different states of the same world, carried along by the flow of time.
Béla Zoltán nevertheless reserves one final metamorphosis for the visitor. At the end of the exhibition, a silver disc reflects our own face at its centre, but a horn now rests upon the forehead of the projected image. The metal surface does more than mirror what stands before it. It adds a possibility. The body itself remains unchanged, yet the image that emerges is no longer purely descriptive. It takes on a mystical charge, as though the reflection were not simply reproducing the self but granting it a higher form, momentarily freed from its ordinary limits. The mirror becomes magical not because it conceals reality, but because it makes a projection of the mind visible. Its force is also deeply introspective, the gaze returns to the self, yet no longer finds exactly what it knows. The horn gives shape to that distance. It materialises the desire to be more than oneself, to exceed one’s own measure, to add an imaginary power to ordinary identity. What had until then existed only as an inner impulse suddenly appears upon the face. Desire becomes an attribute, almost an emblem. Perhaps the magic lies precisely in this slight falsification, in the narrow distance between what we are and what we would like to be able to recognise as ourselves.
