Odysseys is Cédric Van Parys’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, marking

his recent move to Brussels—following periods of living and working in

Shanghai, Rotterdam, Sofia, and Chicago.

The exhibition at KBK introduces recent artistic explorations in sculpture,

photography, and installation, which move between microhistorical readings

of place and speculative inquiries into infrastructures as spaces of promise.

With an interest in tectonics, gravity, weight, and matter, Van Parys

simultaneously engages with movement, traveling, and exploration.

Whether reimagining billboards as sacred portals in Chicago, observing

traces of aerial highways above Brussels, or balancing industrial precision

with raw, organic form, he appropriates, rearranges, or juxtaposes existing

materials or symbols in ways that re-code the familiar, suggesting alternative

readings of the natural and human-made world.

Abstract visual forms give the impression that they inhabit a non-anthro-

pocentric plane, yet they challenge the narrative embedded in material

culture typical of the Anthropocene. While urging a reevaluation of how

we interact with symbols both past and present, Van Parys’s work

manages to extract a spiritual essence hidden within the stone and steel

of industrial structures and infrastructures.

As the title suggests, Odysseys points to travel. However, no archetypal

mythical figures—no Ulysses, Calypso, or Penelope—lurk here; instead,

the exhibition presents odysseys of ideas, materials, and forms that, displaced

from their usual environments, settle only momentarily in the gallery space

in a state of arrested potential. The exhibition, a conversation between hard

matter, movement, and ritual, invites a contemplative stance, suggesting

a potent tension between a poetic sensibility and a critical post-capitalist

message that is just about visible on the horizon.