‘The Wet Wing’ – when silk becomes a river

There’s something shimmering in the historic space of Vleugel 58. It’s not just light playing on fabrics, nor is it a random glow on marble. It is silk turned into water, a river touched by the hands of Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel. Their new exhibition ‘The Wet Wing’ at Z33 is not just art, but a quiet but persistent odyssey along the border between the world of nature and the world of human craftsmanship.

It is as if a living ribbon stretches through the halls – a silken panorama in which the artists weave their inhabitants: freshwater fish, invisible currents, depth that becomes tangible. The canvas flows like a river, disappearing into the architecture, then bursting into the light again. It doesn’t just hang – it moves, its gaze is impossible to catch because it always slips further away, to where the last fold of the fabric ends.

But the river is not the only force that the artists set in motion. Accompanying the silken flow, they create a new series of sculptures: stone pottery, pink marble. Solid, almost immobile forms, but there is a hint of fluidity in them. They seem frozen in the process of transformation: from water to stone, from organic to mineral, from nature to culture. Or is it the other way round?

Dewar and Gicquel are always working at the intersection. Their materials are complex, their techniques take time, but in their hands, craftsmanship becomes something else – not just a craft, but something that slips out of familiar definitions. Here, nature is not opposed to culture; it grows into it, becomes it.

Meanwhile, the river continues to flow.