Antoine Roegiers: La traversée
With La traversée, Keteleer Gallery presents the fourth solo exhibition of Antoine Roegiers (b. 1980, Braine-l’Alleud, BE). Based in Paris, the artist carries within him a Belgian memory that surfaces in his painting. One perceives, like a distant breath, the shadow of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and James Ensor—not as a quotation, but as an inner climate.
For several years, Roegiers has been constructing a world. His paintings never close in on themselves: they extend an underground narrative where forms and figures reappear, move, and transform. Each work is autonomous, yet all participate in the same expanding story.
The recent paintings—seen in this exhibition—evoke a time after. The fire has gone out, the smoke is dissipating. The landscapes bear the traces of what has occurred. Silhouettes and animals return, almost innocent. The band has dispersed. What remains is hesitation, a passage. A stillness crossed by movement.
Le Passage (2025) occupies a pivotal place here. Tested and long traversed, it marks less an end than a threshold. Painting seems to tilt here, opening onto a deeper transformation. La traversée thus becomes both the subject of the images and a metaphor for the artist’s journey.
In parallel, Roegiers develops work in video and animation, presented on the lower floor. From meticulously crafted images based on his paintings, he sets his images in motion, now integrating artificial intelligence into his process. These films do not constitute a separate medium: they extend painting. What was suspended in the image unfolds over time. The artist literally enters his own pictorial space. As he himself puts it, it is “the pleasure of giving life to these images and entering them.”
His works resonate with contemporary tensions—ecological crisis, social fragmentation, loss of collective meaning—without ever being reduced to them. Above all, they appear as mental landscapes, inhabited by masked figures, clues, and fragments of history. The familiar becomes strange.
La traversée thus opens a space of experience: a coherent yet porous world, where the narrative remains intentionally unfinished.
Kathy de Nève, 2026
