EN CREUX
What if the voids told a different story?
   




What if absences told another story?

At the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, the project En creux accompanies the restoration of the Pulpit of Truth, a Baroque masterpiece by Hendrik Frans Verbrugghen, once praised by Victor Hugo. Marked by the passage of time and the disappearance of several sculpted elements, this emblematic work becomes the starting point for an original reflection on memory, absence, and transmission.

En creux invites artists, students, heritage conservators, and scientists to investigate these voids and imagine new forms for them. Through a collaborative and experimental approach, the project transforms absence into a space for creation and dialogue.

Directed by artists Florian Kiniques and Stephan Balleux, this interdisciplinary laboratory brings together students from ArBA-EsA, KIK-IRPA, and the Cathedral’s Church Fabric within a collaboration that forms part of the celebrations marking the 800th anniversary of the cathedral. Participants are invited to engage in artistic research rooted in contemporary questions of heritage, memory, and transformation. In doing so, past and present are brought into dialogue through a living visual language that contributes to a renewed understanding of our shared heritage.
PARTNERS

KIK-IRPA : Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage
Emmanuelle Mercier : Head of the Conservation-Restoration Workshop for Polychrome Wooden Sculptures.

Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula
Fabrique d'église 
Comité GUDULA26


ULB : Université libre de Bruxelles
Muriel Andrin : Film Professor within the Master's Programme in Performing Arts.

Royal Film Archive of Belgium
Arianna Turci : Head of Analog Collections.

GoVR
Guillaume Janssens : Specialist in digitisation technologies and 3D photogrammetry, with particular expertise in heritage applications.

ArBA-EsA : Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the City of Brussels – Higher School of Arts
Stephan Balleux : Artist, professor, and co-head of the Painting Department.
Florian Kiniques : Visual artist, lecturer, and Director of the Collegium of the Royal Academy of Belgium.

Students

Jalaad Ferré &  Enora Le Gall
Paul Herbelot
Charlotte Motuelle
Amina Sapozhnikova
Edmée Vouaux




Exhibition from 15 October to 30 November 2026
PRESENTATION OF THE ARTISTS AND WORKS

CHARLOTTE MOTUELLE

“The pulpit is imposing, pompous, laden with details and stories. Every element seems indispensable, altering the entire narrative and referring to other biblical passages. Amid this profusion, what is missing goes unseen; the absence of the animals that were torn away is too silent to be noticed. The disappearance of these figures thus raises questions about the importance of each element and each gap. Sculpted or human, which figures have a place on the pulpit, and what do they tell us? If you could climb these steps and stand in the pulpit, who would be facing you, and what would you say?”
Charlotte Motuelle

“If we could stand in this pulpit” consists of reformulations of responses from visitors and observers of the sculpture. They are words or refusals, requests or apologies. Imagined words and silences that might have been expressed in this space one does not enter. One sentence per card, to be leafed through on a lectern, written in the imperative, like instructions for an imaginary figure standing in the pulpit.

The first sentences were collected before the installation; subsequent ones are added throughout the exhibition and may have been influenced by reading those that came before.

The project begins with the animals that have disappeared from the pulpit and with the question their disappearance opens up: who has a place there? It therefore seeks to strengthen the encounter with the cathedral’s various publics: passing visitors, members of religious communities, and those who work there. It is as interested in the object and its context as in the people who move around it, and in the ways they look at what it evokes, imposes, conceals, or makes possible.

It gradually takes shape as a space for speech within a place one does not enter.

Biography
Born in Trier, Germany, in 2002, Charlotte Motuelle studied art at Saint-Luc Tournai, then at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels (ArBA-EsA), where she completed a Master’s degree in Painting in 2026.

Her painting draws on familiar images from the German visual culture in which she grew up. She paints, sews, embosses, or engraves persistent images in order to transform them and make them disappear over time.

Artist’s Instagram

If we could stand in this pulpit
2026
Prints on paper, 10.5 × 14.8 cm, wooden lectern.





PAUL HERBELOT

“At first, I wanted to reconstruct the missing peacock from the Pulpit of Truth, the carved wooden bird that had disappeared long ago. I imagined finding it transformed, bearing the marks of time. Then, gradually, without really deciding, the project became a house. I had not planned this shift. It was while visualizing the object in my mind that I realized it was no longer a bird at all, and that the house I was building was also, in a certain way, my own.”
Paul Herbelot

A small house, reduced to the almost archaic simplicity of a child’s drawing. An elementary form: a roof, walls, a door. Its wooden structure disappears beneath a thick skin of felt, a porous and organic material composed of mixed wools and mismatched colours, as though time itself had settled upon it in successive layers. The house seems less constructed than clothed, inhabited from within by something living.

The shutters and door, made of stained glass, remain slightly ajar. Through them appears an inner landscape: heavy clouds, a silent storm, a hidden depth. Not a setting, but an interiority. Perhaps a mental space, perhaps a spiritual one. The whole rests upon a mirrored plinth that frees the object from its weight and gives it the fragile appearance of levitation. Within this reflection, the viewer also catches sight of their own image, as if reminded of their presence before the work.

The project emerged less from an idea than from a slow process of condensation. First, a seminar devoted to loss and absence. Then a missing bird from the Pulpit of Truth. Then a house imagined for that bird. Then simply a house. Then a body. Gradually, correspondences began to surface : the reliquary as a vessel, the body as a dwelling place for the sacred, felt as silent flesh. And then that unexpected shift from one word to another - flesh to pulpit - arising without premeditation, as though language itself were quietly continuing the work begun by forms.

The work does not seek to explain or conclude. Rather, it aims to open a space into which anyone, regardless of their relationship to the sacred, to faith, or to the idea of home, may enter freely through their own door.

Biography

Paul Herbelot, born in 2004 in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, is currently completing his Bachelor's degree in Painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the City of Brussels – École supérieure des Arts (ArBA-EsA), after undertaking his secondary artistic education at the Institut Saint-Luc in Tournai.

His work, meticulous and intuitively assembled like precious treasures, takes the form of miniature paintings, fountains, ex-votos, digital drawings, and painted objects. His attention to rich and dazzling surfaces and materials brings his practice close to that of goldsmithing. Woven, painted, assembled, organic, found, or entirely invented materials are transformed in his hands, acquiring a magical and metaphorical dimension.


Limen
(2025–2026)
Wood, textile, felt, plastic, glass, oil paint, ink, glass beads, mirror

Dimensions: 58 × 67 × 199 cm

 


AMINA SAPOZHNIKOVA

“At the beginning of this project, I wanted to find the missing figures in suspended boxes, like a moment itself held in suspension.
But as I followed the project, I came to bring everything together down to the base, the plinth.
As with the body, I wanted to express a pulpit (chaire) attempting to repair its flesh (chair).
Awkwardly trying to remember its phantom limbs in animal form. But this flesh deteriorates, down to bone and dissection, revealing to us the anatomy of an absence upon a mass of flesh and memories.”
Amina Sapozhnikova

A fleshy plinth, flayed down to the bone. From bottom to top, the animals reappear in wood and plaster, merging with the column. Then, as though stripped of skin, somewhere between erosion and reconstruction, the skeletons of the last missing animals begin to emerge, mechanically printed by a body that knows, even before being reborn.

Under the sculptor’s hands, the work rises like a prosthesis for lost memory, filling the void left by the six sculptures. It invites us to consider this mourning on a human, bodily scale, within an immeasurably vast place supported by columns on a superhuman scale.

Before the pulpit, flesh takes shape in search of truth.

Biography
Amina Sapozhnikova, born in 2006 in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, is completing her Bachelor’s degree in the Painting programme at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels – School of Arts (ArBA-EsA), after completing her secondary art studies at Institut Saint-Luc in Tournai.

If painting is traditionally silent, Amina Sapozhnikova’s work breaks that rule. Largely a portraitist, the artist presents us with taciturn faces that are nevertheless far from silent. The matte, thick surface, like a shell, with which she paints her subjects allows a glimmer of spirit to show through.

I, you, they, we. No one knows. We can only believe we see the egg inside the shell.

What remains of Amina’s painting is the immutable anticipation of hatching and the mystery of what will come of it.

Artist’s Instagram

:UИ/des»m314ng34_d3_c0n5c13nc3%
(one/some mixtures of consciousness)
2025–2026
Wood, clay, plaster, gesso, filler, spray paint and 3D printing
Dimensions: 170 × 51 × 55 cm

EDMÉE VOUAUX

“At first, I became interested in the rear section of the pulpit, devoted to the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Paradise. I was drawn to the scene both for its iconography and for its construction: the tree, the bodies, the serpent, the different forms that fit into and extend one another. But this representation is no longer intact. Some of the animals that once inhabited the branches have disappeared, leaving traces where they were torn away. What is missing then became as present as what remains.”
Edmée Vouaux


It was from this absence that the project gradually shifted. I was no longer seeking to represent the pulpit or reconstruct its missing elements, but to work from what the void produces within a structure. Painting became the first space for this research. Organic and mineral forms seem to develop around a large opening left white. They appear like fragments of a material from which one part has disappeared, or like a structure simultaneously forming and coming apart. The project then left the surface and entered space. The forms in the painting extended into ceramic sculptures. They represent neither the figures nor the animals of the pulpit, but seem to belong to the same family of forms: strange, organic, at times almost architectural fragments that might be remnants of an unknown structure. In turn, they are placed on reflective Plexiglas surfaces, cut according to shapes inspired by the ceramics. The mirror then becomes the prism through which the ceramics are perceived.

These surfaces are placed on fragments of ruins. The ruin introduces a material that genuinely belongs to the history of the site, while the ceramic seems to bring forth a new material. Between the two, the reflection creates an unstable space. The form exists both in its volume and in its image, in its presence and in what doubles it. The void no longer refers only to what has disappeared. It becomes an active space capable of producing new forms. The installation is a contemporary reinterpretation of the pulpit, born from its structure and its gaps. What interests me is transforming the void from an absence into a building material. The ruins, mirrors, ceramics, and painting become fragments of an ensemble that does not seek to recover an original form, but to reveal what can arise from its disappearance.

Biography
Edmée Vouaux, born in Nancy in 1999, lives and works in Brussels. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels – School of Arts (ArBA-EsA), after completing a Bachelor’s degree in Painting at ESA Le 75. She also holds a degree in Communication and Journalism from the Institut supérieur de formation sociale et de communication (ISFSC).

Her practice develops primarily between painting and sculpture, particularly through ceramics, and extends to 3D modelling. It is built around forms in mutation, on the threshold between the recognisable and the indeterminate. Organic fragments, architectures, landscapes, or unnamed materials appear in images that seem to belong to parallel worlds. Her attention to perception, reflections, sheen, and textures allows her to unsettle the gaze and make one material slip into another: clay may evoke metal, a painted surface may suggest volume. Material thus becomes a space of fiction, where attraction borders on unease and where surfaces, almost fetishised, seem endowed with a life of their own.

Artist’s Instagram

Le jardin des absences
2025–2026

Sculpture / Installation
Dimensions: 57 × 81 × 60 cm
Ceramic, CNC-cut mirrored Plexiglas, fragments of ruins used as plinths.

Painting
Dimensions: 82 × 129 cm
Oil paint on canvas.

ENORA LE GALL and JALAAD FERRÉ

“It all began with a single question: what became of the animals that disappeared from the pulpit? Did they find a new place, are they preserved somewhere, forgotten in a cellar, or were they simply destroyed? From these questions, we imagined different scenarios for what might have become of them. Little by little, these hypotheses turned into photographic mises-en-scène. Using the means available to us, we then made our own versions of these animals, giving concrete form to these imagined stories.”
Enora Le Gall and Jalaad Ferré


This photographic project explores the notion of the gap through the absence of the animal statues from the pulpit in the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula. It focuses on the void left by their disappearance and on how this absence can become a starting point for imagination and creation.

Rather than attempting to reconstruct the missing remains, the project proposes reinterpreting them by giving them a new form and a new presence. Each animal becomes the starting point for a photographic mise-en-scène imagining what it might be today. These figures are therefore no longer regarded simply as traces of the past, but as beings in their own right, restored to an identity, a form of life, and a place in the contemporary world.

The project thus unfolds within an imagined narrative: what has become of these animals since their disappearance? Where might they live today? What spaces would they occupy, and in what form might they continue to exist? These questions open the way to new stories and possibilities for reinvention.

Each photograph functions as a fixed shot, an autonomous scene capable of telling its own story while forming part of a series of five images. The narrative deliberately remains open: rather than imposing a single, definitive story, the project allows for different interpretations and imagines several ways in which these vanished presences might continue to exist.

Biographies
Enora Le Gall was born in Le Havre, Normandy, in 2006. She spent seventeen years there before moving to Paris for a preparatory year. She then entered the Nantes Saint-Nazaire School of Fine Arts, in the Territories, Landscapes and Public Spaces programme (DNA), where she developed a practice primarily centred on analogue photography.

She is currently continuing her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels – School of Arts (ArBA-EsA), in the Photography and Public Space department.

Photography is the starting point for all her projects, a way of observing and apprehending the world. It forms the basis of a practice that extends beyond the image through material, movement, and relationships.

Jalaad Ferré is a 21-year-old French artist from Vendée. After a preparatory year in Paris and a period at the Rennes School of Fine Arts, she is currently in her third year of Painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels – School of Arts (ArBA-EsA).

Her practice combines drawing, painting, and wood sculpture.



Rentrez à la maison

2025–2026
Series of five digital photographs, black-and-white prints on fabric.
Dimensions: 100 × 67 cm.













Contact :  f.kiniques@arba-esa.be