Surprising shifts, curves, and frequent changes of direction. The road through the mountains is full of twists and turns.
For his sixth solo exhibition at rodolphe janssen, Thomas Lerooy presents a new series of small and large paintings on panel and on canvas, alongside unique sculptures in bronze and stone.
With Twists and Turns, Lerooy continues to build an oeuvre that recontextualizes and demystifies existing visual lexicons. His sculptures depict bronze faces crushed between massive stone blocks. They evoke the tension between movement and stillness, between freedom and constraint. These works suggest an allegory of a society that both shapes and crushes us. They embody the state of being stuck, a condition where rigidity and pressure are palpable. Yet, within this fixation lies an inherent energy, a force that resists confinement and ushers transformation.
The paintings function as a floating cloud around the closed sculptures, like shadows shifting between them. Lerooy creates a play of reflection and reinterpretation, where the works dance between past and present, acting as peepholes—small openings offering the viewer a glimpse into his thought process.
Lerooy’s oeuvre constantly balances between opposites: the sculptures and paintings constantly contrast between heaviness and lightness, concealment and revelation, grotesque and intimate, classical and twisted, observing and being seen. Twists and Turns is an exercise in seeing differently, in rephrasing what we think we know. An exhibition that not only reflects on Lerooy’s own work but also on broader visual structures—and the frameworks that define how and what we see.
