material is the key

Elen Braga, Ryo Kinoshita & Noemi Weber

at Wouters Gallery, Brussels

' (...) Between figuration and abstraction, monumentality and miniaturization, these three practices share a common interest in the question of the monument — not as a stable or authoritative form, but as a struc- ture to be reimagined. Through material, each proposes a way of shifting, opening, and re-situating what constitutes memory, revealing, in its folds and tensions, the narratives it carries as much as those it makes possible.'

excerpt of exhibition text by Oriane Durand

April 23 - May 30, 2026

opening Wednesday April 22, 6-9pm (during Art Brussels Gallery Night)

in collaboration with DREI, Cologne, DE

for more information please contact the gallery at info@woutersgallery.com

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The exhibition material is the key brings together the work of Elen Braga, Ryo Kinoshita, and Noemi Weber, whose practices unfold at the threshold between two and three dimensions. Each engages with material in a distinct way — wool in Braga’s work, canvas in Kinoshita’s, paint in Weber’s — approached here as a living archive. Laden with histories and narratives sedimented over time, material does not merely support or generate form: it acts as a key, both revelatory and critical, through which the past may be revisited and inheriteds ystems of value unsettled.

In the work of Elen Braga and Noemi Weber, this engagement with material is rooted in a sustained reflection on formal and symbolic legacies shaped by patriarchal and Western structures of domina- tion. The hand-tufted tapestry fragments by Braga, produced as part of Elen ou Hubris (2020), depict a self-portrait of the artist lifting a weight. Installed in 2020 on the Cinquantenaire Arch in Brussels, the monumental 120 m2 work entered into a critical dialogue with an architectural structure marked by colonial history1. In the works presented here, the artist’s figure fragments, repeats, and condenses: a stylized body, on the verge of abstraction, emerges from the textile surface. The softness of the wool contrasts with the symbolic density of the work, where questions of power, representation, and monu- mentality are both invoked and displaced.

Noemi Weber’s paintings extend this inquiry within a space held in suspension between abstraction and figuration. With Calm, The Stage is Never Empty [Renaissance State of Mind\ing – Inhabitation] (2025), Weber shifts the question of what constitutes a monumental mode of representation onto the color itself. She understands paintings as storages informed by the legacy of the central perspective, transporting political implications and shaping perception as well as visual knowledge until today. The large quad- riptych, composed of four vertical panels in earthy brown tones, draws the gaze into the matte density of its surface.

Made from acrylic paint, cellulose, and marble powder, the canvas absorbs light rather than reflecting it, and in doing so, invokes the charged symbolism of brown: a color long denied positive connotations within Western art history, where Black people have been rarely represented outside narratives of ra- cial domination. The title carries a quiet irony: the stage is never empty, for the color itself bears an en- tire history. By reworking conventions such as the monochrome and monumental scale, Weber expos- es the power structures embedded within painting, while opening it toward processes of recomposition and the circulation of meaning.

While Braga and Weber approach material as a critical form of memory, Ryo Kinoshita rethinks the very conditions of its appearance. In the works presented, the canvas is worked from within — perforat- ed, sewn, stratified — revealing an active textile structure.
Fragmented motifs oscillate between figuration and ornament: silhouettes, objects, and organic forms drift across systems of repetition and variation. Beneath an apparently decorative dimension unfolds a more ambiguous register, where a latent violence intermittently surfaces, in tension with the softness and almost melodic rhythm of the whole.

This instability is heightened by the treatment of the canvas as a permeable membrane, exposing its in- terstices and layered construction. Long regarded as a neutral, even untouchable support, the canvas is here opened up and reworked its very substance, becoming a space of circulation in which the visible emerges as much from what is revealed as from what recedes.

Between figuration and abstraction, monumentality and miniaturization, these three practices share a common interest in the question of the monument — not as a stable or authoritative form, but as a struc- ture to be reimagined. Through material, each proposes a way of shifting, opening, and re-situating what constitutes memory, revealing, in its folds and tensions, the narratives it carries as much as those it makes possible.

Text by Oriane Durand

1 - The monument and its surrounding park, commissioned to celebrate 50 years of Belgian independence, were built and completed under the patronage of King Leopold II using funds generated from his brutal exploitation of the Con- go Free State.