Working with sculpture, installation, and text-based material, Simon Bultynck (1992, Ghent) examines and redefines notions of meaning, translation, and authorship. Over the years, he has produced bronze cast paintings, text-inscribed sculptures, and printed matter that engage with appropriated references across different forms. Through processes of casting, layering, and reconfiguration, his work questions how shifts in material, context, and reproduction mediate perception—leaving behind traces of existing works to explore the tension between presence and absence, authenticity and iteration.

Petits Tableaux focusses on landscape paintings made after 1840, when the first daguerreotypes began to emerge. By casting these paintings in bronze, the series turns to the traces of a practice and medium whose position has since been questioned time and again. It brings together reproductions of historical landscapes by artists who worked deliberately at the margins, or pursued painting for the pleasure of the act itself, rather than for any wider artistic agenda. Cast in bronze with a monochromatic patina, the works offer echoes of a vanished image while making tangible the artistic labor and the intimate, almost private nature of the painter’s engagement with their subject.