Hans Op de Beeck: Danse Macabre

Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio presents Hans Op de Beeck’s solo exhibition entitled Danse Macabre, curated by Angel Moya Garcia and open to the public from April 11 to October 25, 2026.

Hans Op de Beeck works across a wide variety of media and forms, steadily developing a versatile body of works that includes installations, sculptures, video works, texts, drawings, photography and watercolour paintings. For the past decade, Op de Beeck has also been active in theatre, opera, and contemporary dance as a playwright, stage director, scenographer, and costume designer. He is perhaps best known for his monumental, immersive, sensorial installations which are structured as enigmatic, fictional scenes frozen in time that visitors can walk through or sit within, evoking silent contemplation and moments of wonder. His distinctive body of work delves into the complex relationship between humans and the world around us, while also addressing universal questions about the invisible framework of being. 

The exhibition at the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio unfolds through a site-specific installation and an animated film. The former, entitled Danse Macabre, appears as a black-and-white evocation of a nocturnal park composed of bare trees and puddles, where the path leads us to a life-size, monochrome grey afterimage of a carousel. This evocation of a fictional, colourless landscape acts as an accessible, cinematic and atmospheric “establishing shot” to potential stories in which oil drums smoulder with fire, the treetops stand stripped bare, and the winding path draws us toward the abandoned attraction, immersed in a night of absolute blackness.  

The title “Danse Macabre” refers to the stationary procession of carriages, horses, and objects that allude to death, which Op de Beeck designed as a kind of enlarged still life. The still life as an historical genre has a tradition of being a “memento mori”, a reminder of the transience and relativity of our lives. On the carousel, we encounter a whole family of skeletons, apparently enjoying themselves, piles of leftover plates, cake scraps, empty bottles and glasses, ashtrays, fruit and the like, which remind us of the battlefield of things left behind after a big party. Nothing is as it seems in this seemingly fossilized carousel, where a child's skeleton holds a roaring seal on a leash, a dandyish male skeleton calmly smokes a cigarette in a carriage, or where a toy airplane evokes a bomber from the First World War.

A musical soundscape, composed by Sam Vloemans and performed by the Hermes Ensemble (B), resonates from afar throughout the landscape, drawing us toward the second part, where the animated film Vanishing Point is screened, completing the exhibition. Its title, Vanishing Point, refers to a point in a picture plane of a perspective view where mutual parallel lines seem to converge. At the distance of a vanishing point, we can no longer perceive three-dimensional depth. Op de Beeck uses the term metaphorically, as a tipping point from which we shift from measurability and legibility into the unknown, indecipherable, and incomprehensible, or from the concrete to the abstract, mental to spiritual. The film starts with the image of a little boy resting peacefully on his back with his eyes closed. Next, we are transported to fictional landscapes, still lifes and figures. Together with the music, the watercolours are brought to life creating a sweeping, tranquil mood that invites one to briefly disappear into a moment of letting go.

Vanishing, on its own, means “disappearing suddenly and completely”, or, in mathematical terms, “becoming zero”. Op de Beeck is fascinated by the moments when, as human beings, we briefly become nothing or nobody—when we let us go out of our linguistic, logical, and rational understanding of the world and slip into a state of self-loss and timelessness.