Art Brussel 2026, with James Collins
Encounter stand
James Collins paintings are shaped from latent traces and established over large passages of time, the paintings hold the history of their making in the dense ground from which they emerge. Each work is rooted in a syntax of recurring structures, forms particular to Collins. His compositions are constructed, excavated and dispersed repeatedly until an image starts to take shape. The works operate like a covered archaeological site, but one in which new forms grow over the scars of the land. Accumulated weight, arrangement of space and encrusted surfaces suggest underlying matter. Foundational lines and directional planes are left poised on the edge of tidal movement. Similar to a stream of water impressing itself onto the earth, the works slowly carve and reshape familiar compositional routes, depositing a rich sediment of references as they journey through their painterly landscapes. Often a series of interwoven forms will catch the light, like the skeletal body of a buried fossil enticing the eye from within the face of a rock.In this
body of work Collins investigates the relationship between alchemy
Manuela Falcão utilises intuitive and experimental processes of moulding, glazing and firing to imbue each of her ceramic sculptures with a distinctive identity. This series is also strongly rooted in environment, both built and organic. Some of the forms can be read as contorted roots or flora stretching out into space, whilst others have more delineated structures, interwoven like pieces of a visual puzzle with no fixed beginning or end. They are shapeshifters, at once familiar and strange, often fragmented and layered from multiple firings. They balance carefully, like branches of coral rooting themselves amidst a tidal swell or intimate artefacts tentatively brought to light. Often, Falcão works in groups or series, iterating on a specific form or structure until she finds the balance between abstract gesture and figurative suggestion, each sculpture in the collective informing the next. The hand of the artist is distinctly felt not only in the sculptures laboured surfaces but in their painterly glazes and subtle layering of colour.