Hans Op de Beeck – Danse Macabre. Solo Exhibition at Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio

Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio presents the solo exhibition of Hans Op de Beeck, titled Danse Macabre, curated by Angel Moya Garcia, from April 11 to October 25, 2026.

Hans Op de Beeck, Danse Macabre. Ph: Dominique Provost

Hans Op de Beeck works across a wide range of media and forms, developing over time a versatile body of work that includes installations, sculptures, video, texts, drawings, photography, and watercolor paintings. Over the past decade, he has also been active in theatre, opera, and contemporary dance as a playwright, director, scenographer, and costume designer. He is best known for his monumental, immersive, and sensory installations, composed of enigmatic, fictional scenes frozen in time, which evoke silent contemplation or moments of wonder. His work explores the complex relationship between human beings and the world around them, while also addressing universal questions related to the invisible framework of existence.

The exhibition at the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio unfolds through a site-specific installation and an animated film. The former, titled Danse Macabre, appears as a black-and-white image of a nocturnal park, composed of bare trees and bodies of water, traversed by a path leading toward a life-size monochrome grey carousel. This evocation of a fictional, colorless landscape functions as a cinematic and atmospheric “opening shot,” open to potential narratives, in which oil barrels become bonfires, treetops are stripped bare, and a winding path leads us toward an abandoned attraction immersed in complete darkness.

The conventional carousel, as we still know it today in many variations, is usually a baroque object, brightly colored, sparkling, and kitsch, nostalgically evoking past times when it faced little competition from today’s noisy and crowded attractions. In 1999, at the beginning of his career, Op de Beeck created the video Blender, in which a pompous, colorful carousel slowly began to rotate before dissolving into an indecipherable swirling motion, like cotton candy, only to come to a halt again. Since then, the carousel has become a recurring motif in his work, serving as a metaphor for the human condition. The artist considers the carousel a deeply human form of entertainment—somehow tragicomic—but also rather absurd, as we place our children on wooden horses and let them spin endlessly in circles.

In these objects or structures of leisure, no longer—or no longer fully—in use, a melancholic undertone emerges. The subdued or vanished joy lends these objects, originally conceived to be in motion, colorful, and crowded, a gloom akin to the emptiness left after a celebration. The monochrome grey color gives the carousel a completely crystallized and inert appearance, like a fossil fixed in time. By removing all color, the carousel is stripped of its final layer of vitality, further distancing it from the real object. This work is a sculptural interpretation, not an imitation. The matte grey suffocates the image, yet at the same time elevates it into something entirely other, like a residue covered in ash after a great fire, or an object abandoned after a war or nuclear catastrophe.

The title Danse Macabre refers to the immobile procession of carriages, horses, and objects alluding to death, which Op de Beeck has conceived as a kind of enlarged still life. Historically, the still life genre has functioned as a memento mori, a reminder of the transience and relativity of our lives. On the carousel, an entire family of skeletons appears to be enjoying themselves, alongside stacks of used plates, remnants of cakes, bottles and empty glasses, ashtrays, fruit, and similar elements that recall an abandoned battlefield. Nothing is as it seems in this seemingly fossilized carousel: the skeleton of a little girl holds a roaring seal on a leash; that of a dandy calmly smokes a cigarette in a carriage; and a small airplane evokes a World War I bomber.

A soundscape, composed by Sam Vloemans and performed by the Hermes Ensemble, resonates distantly throughout the space, guiding us toward the second part of the exhibition, where the animated film Vanishing Point is projected. The title refers to the point on the picture plane in a perspective view where pairs of parallel lines appear to converge. At the distance of the vanishing point, we are no longer able to perceive three-dimensional depth. Op de Beeck uses the term metaphorically, as a turning point that leads from measurability and readability toward the unknown, the indecipherable, the incomprehensible—or from the concrete to the abstract, from the intellectual to the spiritual. The film begins with the image of a child lying peacefully on its back, eyes closed. We are then transported into fictional landscapes, still lifes, and figures.

Together with the music, the watercolors come to life, creating a calm and immersive atmosphere that invites us to disappear into a moment of surrender.

“Vanishing” itself means “to disappear suddenly and completely,” or, in mathematical terms, “to become zero.” Op de Beeck is fascinated by those moments in which, as human beings, we become, for an instant, nothing or no one—when we let go of our linguistic, logical, and rational understanding of the world and slip into a state of self-loss and atemporality.