Between line and body
Hannes Couvreur — Between Line and Body
"I begin with a line that doesn’t know where it's going. Only when it stumbles does it become a body."
— Hannes Couvreur
In the work of Hannes Couvreur, figures exist in a space between recognition and estrangement. With an apparently simple use of line, he evokes a complex inner landscape—one inhabited by bodies entangled with themselves, with each other, or with something unnamed. His drawings breathe both control and chaos, tenderness and distortion.
These are not classical portraits or scenes, but snapshots of psychological states. The figures appear introspective, as if trapped within their own contours—or perhaps slipping out of them. At times they are repeated, overrun, or almost erased. Each work speaks of a search for the threshold: between inside and outside, form and dissolution, the human and the animal, the grotesque and the childlike.
Couvreur draws with lines the way one breathes: sometimes soft, hesitant, barely there; then suddenly heavy, dominant, insistent. His use of repetition, layering, and fragmentation recalls both the automatic drawing of surrealism and contemporary meditations on identity and embodiment.
Above all, these works feel physical, personal, intuitive. As if the drawings are not just about bodies, but becoming bodies themselves—bodies that waver, falter, search—and in doing so, mirror our own.
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