Billytown

In this exhibition, Robbert Pauwels’ sweeping, turbulent, and somewhat melancholic brushstrokes are drawn out from the intimacy of the page into the arena of the gallery space, creating a circular installation which leads the viewer through a series of large-scale wall paintings punctuated by sculptural elements.

On this scale, Pauwels’ work shifts the isolated (day)dream into a fluid reality, showing the frustrated but familiar state of both looking forwards and backwards simultaneously: longing, remembering, worrying, endlessly associating, but never fully existing in the so- called ‘here and now’.

Pinned down by the monumental format of the wall painting, a shifting landscape of droplets, letters, fences, and shuddering figures pass by as we travel from the city, through the dunes, towards the small-town of youth.