This article, which proposes a color-centered approach to recent exhibitions, is the fourth in a series commissioned by the ICA. Before moving on to the follow-up of the article Parisian Colors, here’s a little interlude to enjoy the European Month of Photography, especially in Brussels.
So, I’ve selected three photographers featured in the 10th Photo Brussels Festival:
- Jean-Bernard Métais, La Couleur du temps, at Galerie La Forest Divonne (8 January – 22 February 2026)
- Pixy Liao, People in Mirror are closer than they appear, Galerie Stieglitz19 (15 January – 21 February 2026)
- Jesse Willems, LUZ, Schönfeld Gallery (11 January – 28 February)
The Color of Time
The Color of Time, or the iris of wine? If the eyes are the mirror of the soul, do Jean-Bernard Métais’s photos give us access to the soul of wine?
Jean-Bernard Métais is both a winemaker and an artist. For 50 years, he has been photographing the vats of his wine, capturing its evolution at different stages of maturation. If he doesn’t (yet) endow this beverage with a soul, he nonetheless considers it a being in its own right. Indeed, since 1989, his photos have been archived under the title “The Births of the Wine Being.”
And for color lovers, this series presented at Galerie La Forest Divonne is a delight. Yet the artist claims no aesthetic agenda—only the poetry of the living.
The three selected photos particularly draw me in through the quality of their contrasts, the richness of their tones, and the subtle variety within formal simplicity.
A personal selection
The first one offers a very light blue background at the center of the vat, gradually enriched with sparkles of a deeper blue. Mauve ramifications emerge from the heart, darkening and densifying toward the periphery until they intertwine with the coppery dendrites at the edges, progressively compartmentalizing the organic form. The copper-mauve harmony within a range of blues is particularly successful.
Imagine the photo rotated 90° and cropped as a rectangle: the magic of the iris vanishes, revealing a naive tree against a sky. The rigorous choice of a disk inscribed in a uniform square precisely neutralizes any figurative anecdote, any scale reference, and ensures the series’ coherence.
Built on the same principle, the second places greater emphasis on the coppery edge of the vat. It becomes a flamboyant setting for a light violet heart. The smooth, minimally nuanced center cracks at the periphery like sun-baked dried earth. A Bordeaux red traces the fissures and draws symmetrical wings on the right lateral structure, adding texture and variety. An oblong black point, placed on this axis of symmetry, punctuates the image and breaks its predictability.
The last work remains enigmatic: reflections suggesting a golden sphere, immediately contradicted by the pink-edged liquid at the bottom; a lighter film floats there and marbles the surface. Three dark squares discreetly structure the whole, bathed in warm tones—light pink, golden yellow-orange, clay browns up to deep brown. It’s simply beautiful.
One downside: on large enlargements, JPEG compression artifacts alter the finesse of the organic textures, which are essential to this visual poetry.
People in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
A smile instantly lights up the visitor’s face as they push open the door of this small gallery on rue Saint-Georges. Is it the intimacy of the space or the immediate warmth with which Pixy Liao (@bloodypixy) welcomes you? According to her, if her work makes you smile, you’ve grasped its essence.
The exhibition notice—“these performative self-portraits, sometimes risqué, overturn traditional gender hierarchies”—places the artist firmly in the zeitgeist, but that’s not what draws me in. What touches me is the offbeat humor, the Wes Anderson-like colorful universe, the assumed vintage feel, and above all this complicit invitation the artist extends to the viewer, welcomed into her intimate theater.
Three photos
The first one unsettles me: Pixy behind a large hexagonal flask, as if offering her head in a jar. The unease perhaps comes from the partial duplication of the face on either side, crossed by a central shadow. I love the vertical jade reflection to the left of the face, a chromatic echo of a window likely out of frame. The coppery tone of the body elsewhere makes a beautiful chromatic transition with Jean-Bernard Métais’s work seen earlier.
The second instantly evokes Wes Anderson: centered composition, restricted pastel palette, surprise and invention. The model’s simultaneously provocative and chaste pose in front of her fake-voyeur companion is amusing. Well done Pixy! —including this photo in the festival program, you hooked me! I love these thermal bath atmospheres; we find them again in another photograph where bright yellow basins serve as a counterpoint to a huge painted mountain backdrop. Martin Parr is not far away.
The third surprises again: a couple—seen from behind—dazzled by an invisible spectacle, sharing a complicit wonder. Deliberate overexposure, cheesy pose… We slip into a world of idyllic love; everything is staged, we’re not fooled, and yet it works.
LUZ
Jesse Willems’s work is not explicitly mentioned in the 10th Brussels Photo Festival program, even though Schönfeld Gallery is listed.
No matter—I take the liberty of talking about it here. These abstract photographs may puzzle fans of more traditional photography, though this kind of approach is far from new. One can sense a certain kinship with Saul Leiter, Ernst Haas, or Franco Fontana, with that same taste for composition and color.
Three abstract compositions
The first composition grabs attention: where does reality end and the artist’s intervention begin? The black shapes, likely shadows on a light granulated floor, offer a very graphic contrast. A pale orange T, slightly tilted, structures and divides the image unevenly. Two smaller shapes of the same color echo each other on either side, balancing the whole. The top and bottom dialogue: a large, slightly blurred bluish-gray triangle counterbalances a more mineral, sharper elongated shape in the same hue. The inversion of black/white contrasts at the right edge further energizes the composition. The bluish-gray / pale orange contrast against black and white signs is particularly seductive. One senses the photographer’s delight in the colour that emerges from everyday life.
The second composition, immediately very different, is all curves and roundness. The shapes extend onto the frame, changing color as they do. At the top left, a vivid blue loses its intensity as it crosses the frame, as if yielding its chromatic strength to the red curve outlining its contour. On the right, a tonic orange pushes the gaze out of the frame, only to bring it back lower toward a complex ultramarine blue shape. Orange/blue, the great classic, works wonderfully here in what seems to be a maquette of cut paper illuminated, generating shadows, openings, and lights.
The third composition, magnificently simple, evokes 1950s architecture or posters: black/white contrasts in dynamic curves, and a single color—a mahogany red—that bursts out of the frame.
In each image, a border of varying width seems to separate interior from exterior, affirming the artist’s intent to suggest a potential “beyond the frame.”
In conclusion
These three photographers to whet your appetite: a photo festival is meant to be savored.
At Galerie La Forest Divonne, the hanging of La Couleur du temps is particularly well done. Games and dialogues unfold between glass sculptures and Jean-Bernard Métais’s photographs, subtly suggesting to the less-informed visitor a link to the world of winemaking.
Don’t miss the small Galerie Stieglitz19, where Pixy Liao’s fabricated universe will charm you.
The Rivoli complex, home to Galerie Schönfeld, is a must for Brussels art lovers. You can’t walk through it without encountering a work that speaks to you. Several galleries are participating in the 10th Photo Brussels. Don’t pass by Jesse Willems’s compositions, where photography becomes pure abstraction extending onto the frame.
So go explore the venues of the 10th Photo Brussels or any photographic exhibition this February!