VOID

L’image du souvenir

November 6 – January 17, 2026


The impossible transparency of the image


In this new exhibition, the Brussels-based collective VOID, a duo formed by Arnaud Eeckhout and Mauro Vitturini, continues its exploration of the areas of uncertainty in the visible. Since their beginnings, their work has unfolded in a continuous dialogue between seeing and hearing, between what is imprinted and what resonates. For a long time, their practice has focused on making sound visible and images audible through a physical writing of vibration. The appearance of figurative images, which began with the Memories series (2024), marks a turning point in this research: it is the first time that VOID directly confronts the question of the bearable image, of what we choose to look at or not.


With VOID, seeing is never an immediate act. It is a movement of withdrawal, a way of listening. The images do not fade away: they are filtered, like reverberation or distortion running through a sound. This visual disturbance acts as a form of perceptual tuning: it tempers the brutality of reality, softening memory without dissolving it. Where others would seek to reveal, VOID invents a poetics of concealing.


The black-and-white photographs in Memories are altered according to a protocol of gradual, almost breath-like erasure. Some come from a private collection, others from the collective image library, these images from the press that haunt our shared memory. Their filtering is neither censorship nor secrecy: it allows the gaze to remain without reopening the wound, to keep at a distance in order to better understand.


This idea of active distance, of a slowed-down gaze, connects with the pictorial tension of Gerhard Richter, for whom blurring is not a loss but a condition of truth. VOID shares this same desire for a gaze that does not impose but proposes. The image becomes a breathable space, no longer a sharp surface but a soft, porous material, open to the vibration of sound.


The Souvenir series (Botanique, Brussels, 2022) already laid the foundations for this. Created from carbon black engraved by the sound grooves of anonymous voices, these pieces contain no photography. The sound literally leaves its mark, fragile and volatile. What burns leaves an imprint; what fades away remains.


The altarpieces prolong this tension between beauty and disaster. One shows an iceberg painted in oil, whose outer copper panels bear the phrase: “Pleurer de sang froid” (Cry cold blood). Another depicts a plume of smoke, an apparition engraved by hammering into the metal. Other engraved altarpieces — "Être combustible" (Be combustible), "Ralentir la fin" (Slow down the end), "Brûler dans la lumière" (Burn in the light), “Entendre le foyer” (Hear the home), "Au bord du monde" (At the edge of the world) — expand on this meditation on catastrophe as a metaphor for time. These forms of secular altars become places of critical contemplation, where light captures the trace of gesture and breath.

The small paintings, taken from press images, linger on the edges of the event. By framing what lies on the margins of the subject, they produce a foreign familiarity, a collective déjà vu. It is in this almost imperceptible shift that the poetic power of VOID's work is born.


Finally, in the series Nos soupirs (Our Sighs) paint is applied on the reverse side of copper: the outer plates are engraved with musical silences, sighs, half-sighs, quarter-sighs, as if memory itself were breathing.


With VOID, sound does not accompany the image: it is its invisible counterpart, its inner breath. Together, they compose a vibrant material, a field of resonances where the visible and the audible merge. In the background, it calls to mind Christian Boltanski, Pascal Convert or Lawrence Abu Hamdan, for whom disappearance becomes material for memory. But here, these connections fade away in the clarity of a voice of its own: that of an art that does not describe disaster but suspends its violence and preserves its vibration.


VOID approaches our era from an acute awareness of its visual saturation. In a world where each image consumes itself in its own clarity, the collective replaces transparency with meditative opacity and speed with a temporality of listening. Their work does not document loss; it preserves its breath.


Henri van Melle
October 2025


KEY DATES

Collective founded in 2013 by Arnaud Eechkout (BE), born in 1987, and Mauro Vitturini (IT), born in 1985. They live and work in Brussels, Belgium.


2012 Bachelor's degree in painting, Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome, Italy (Mauro Vitturini).

2013 Master's degree in public art, IDM, ARTS2, Mons, Belgium (Arnaud Eeckhout).

2013 523 names of soldiers dead in action pronounced at the same time, public commission, Monument aux Morts, Mons, Belgium. 

2015 Prix Médiatine, Brussels, Belgium.

2016 Not all That Falls Has Wings, group exhibition, ARTER – space for art, Istanbul, Turkey. 

2018 Prix Salomon Foundation Residency Award, ISCP, New York, USA.

2019 Creation of two in situ works, commissioned by L’Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium.

2020 Art and science research residency, in collaboration with KIKK and Unamur, Namur, Belgium. 

2021 [vwaʁ], first solo exhibition at Galerie Papillon.

2022 SARATM* Souvenir Archival Recording Apparatus*, Museum of Jardin Botanique, Brussels, Belgium.
SEE (Sonic Eatable Experience), performance produced by ING, Aula Magna, Flagey, Stadsschouwburg and Concertgebouw, Belgium

2024 La Maison des collections, public commission, Lescarts house, Mons, Belgium.