Von Wolfe
The Space In Between
MARUANI MERCIER Gallery, Brussels
4 September - 18 October 2025
Portraying figures in restrained interiors or expansive landscapes, the works in
The Space In Between evade attribution to a fixed space and time. The works
are developed in collaboration with artificial intelligence, but not as mere tools
of image generation. Instead, Von Wolfe treats the AI as an errant interlocutor
- producing a flood of visual propositions, outliers, and uncanny hybrids. From
this visual delirium, the artist isolates moments of particular psychic intensity,
reworking them by hand in oil with classical precision. What results is a new
kind of mythic realism - one that emerges from the machine’s subconscious
and the artist’s instinctual logic.
Compositional elements surrounding the figures, such as toy trains, houses
or pearls stand out for their specificity and alluring strangeness, yet remain
paradoxically resistant to interpretation. Alluding to a narrative through
meticulously detailed forms, each painting hovers over the boundary between
the realist and the magical, conjuring the space of profound psychological
tension. As the artist notes, “I’m interested in The Space In Between things. It
doesn’t matter which era the objects in the paintings come from, they could
be a contemporary jet or a bird cage. What is important to me is that they are
not symbols and this frame of reference that they give shouldn’t be too fixed,
they don’t have a fixed meaning.”
Responding to one another through a harmonised palette, the paintings in
The Space In Between construct the vision of a world that subtly deviates from
the Newtonian sense of physical space. In Golden Blaze, the figure casts a
shadow that appears distanced, as if animated by a distinct presence. She
is leaning precariously above a miniature house on fire, its flames abstracted
into an almost improbable stillness. By intermingling passages of luminous
precision with discreet distortions of the laws of physics, Von Wolfe transforms
the composition into a psychological realm, a space of personal interiority and
reflection.
In Secret Journey, the protagonist turns elegantly to meet our gaze, her
presence and power underscored by the low horizon line evocative of classical
portraiture. Her expression of surprise or address, lit at a sharp angle against
the velvet dark texture of the empty room, alludes to the sense of psychic
tension. The toy train on a chain, seemingly advancing along an incomplete
track, emits smoke – a scene of an enigmatic push and pull, frozen in a poignant
compositional equilibrium.
Operating in the space between intuitive human discernment and a cuttingedge
technology, between creating and finding an image amid the echoes of human
knowledge, the artist considers each medium in its own right, distinct, yet
harmoniously interconnected. As Von Wolfe explains, “I see the two media as
not hierarchical – for me, they’re more like a voice and an echo, or a body and
a shadow. I wouldn’t place somehow the shadow in a lesser place because it
doesn’t have the physicality of the body, nor the echo in some way as the less
beautiful, powerful instrument than the voice.”