Nicolas Party in Bruges

In this video, Nicolas Party travels to Bruges, Belgium to discuss the inspiration for his exhibition Toile d’araignée with Xavier Hufkens.

Filmed at the Groeningemuseum and in the Belgian city, Nicolas Party discusses the new bodies of work. The works in 'Toile d’araignée' revolve around a series of recurring motifs—reflections, bridges, double portraits, dead fish, spider webs and trees—each exploring states of transition and transformation.

The Bruges-inspired pastels, derived from Georges Rodenbach's 'Bruges-la-Morte' (1892), shift attention away from architecture towards water, reflection and doubling, establishing themes that echo through later reinterpretations such as Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's D'entre les morts (1954), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). Elsewhere, Party turns to dead fish, engaging with the tradition of Dutch nature morte while recalling the unsettling still lifes of Francisco de Goya and the late paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Removed from any recognisable setting, these works hover between material presence and symbolic resonance, resisting narrative certainty.

Alongside these, spider webs and treescapes extend the exhibition's meditation on time, fragility and renewal. Painted at dawn, when dew briefly renders their delicate structures visible, the webs become metaphors for cyclical labour and the inherent fragility of pastel itself. The trees, by contrast, introduce a quieter sense of openness, their softened forms and expansive skies replacing the compressed spaces of the Bruges works while recalling the tree's enduring symbolism as a link between earth and sky. Rather than presenting fixed meanings, these interconnected bodies of work invite viewers to dwell in a world where images continually shift between appearance and disappearance, memory and reality, permanence and transience.