Evanitas
Tryptich, female crucifix, installation
What remains, when everything fades?
In Evanitas, Hannes Couvreur offers a poetic and visual meditation on impermanence. The title — a fusion of evanescence and vanitas (the art historical genre that contemplates the transience of earthly life) — sets the tone for a contemporary reflection on themes once central to the Flemish Primitives, particularly Jan Van Eyck.
But Couvreur’s subjects are no saints or celestial visions. They are flesh-and-blood humans: fragmented bodies, signs of aging, intimate landscapes of skin — evoking the devotional panels of old, yet viewed through an earthly, human lens. Alongside them: mosses, snow, starlit skies — a quiet dialogue between body, nature, and time.
At the heart of the installation stands an assemblage both familiar and uncanny: a prie-dieu (prayer bench), topped with a vanity mirror and crowned by a ring light, forming a contemporary halo. What once served for prayer becomes a site of reflection — quite literally. Not a reliquary, but a ritual space for contemplating the now: the body, its disappearance, and perhaps even the search for meaning.
The work also oscillates between seriousness and absurdity. A child dressed as a princess, wearing a crown made of toilet paper, hints at how play and symbolism intertwine. How masks gather meaning. How the banality of daily life can suddenly become a space of wonder — or reverence.
Evanitas invites stillness. It invites seeing. In the fragile, fleeting things of the world, a glimpse of the sublime reveals itself.
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