Daan Gielis: U'LL BE FINE

For U'LL BE FINE, the first solo exhibition of Daan Gielis (1988–2023), Keteleer Gallery turns its gaze to a striking and telling part of his oeuvre: the neon sculptures. Although Gielis worked with a wide range of materials and techniques, his neons form a recurring and meaningful element within his body of work, acting as visual anchor points in a layered artistic practice.

Daan Gielis was a Belgian artist whose poetic and deeply personal practice explored the tensions between vulnerability and resilience, desire and disillusionment, individuality and connectedness. With roots in hardcore punk and shaped by living with a chronic illness, Gielis developed a unique visual language—often using neon, sculpture, and installation—to express the emotional contradictions and social paradoxes of contemporary life.

His work moves effortlessly between high and low culture, drawing from subcultures, emojis, pop aesthetics, and art historical references to question how meaning is created and experienced. Recurring motifs such as wilting flowers, crying smileys, and desolate jungles created a space in which opposing feelings can coexist—hopeful and sad, strong and fragile—revealing the poetry of our inner contradictions.

At the center of his oeuvre lies a quiet yet powerful urge toward sincerity and connection: a desire to transform the personal into something universal. With his work, Gielis offered both solace and resistance, posing the question of how we can continue to live meaningfully in a world that often feels incoherent.

Neon light carries an ambiguous promise. It is intrusive and seductive, distant and intimate, cheap and precious at the same time. In Gielis’s hands, the medium gains a polyphonic charge: his neons do not speak in slogans. Their colors are bright, but their message is often nuanced. By abstracting and distorting symbols, Gielis slows down our interaction with a visual language we usually read automatically. The neon sculptures embody the paradox in which our social lives are entangled: the attempt to express a deeply personal story in a relentlessly generic language.

In art history, neon is known as a medium that balances between commerce and art, between the public and the personal. From Bruce Nauman, who fragments language and the body through neon, to Tracey Emin, who uses it to express vulnerability and intimacy—the medium is repeatedly employed to reflect on how meaning arises, how emotion is visualized. Gielis, too, aligns himself with this lineage, though with a distinctly contemporary perspective: his neons are not merely “images in light,” but fields of tension in visual form, in which the intimate is magnified into a shared experience.

This exhibition marks a first moment of focused attention within a broader, long-term engagement with the oeuvre of Daan Gielis. In the coming years, Keteleer Gallery aims to gradually unfold the layers of his practice—a practice in which various media, materials, and atmospheres repeatedly touch the same existential undercurrent: that of the human being caught between wanting and not being able, between trying and failing, between beauty and melancholy.

 

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