CURATORIAL REVIEW | December 11, 2025
SOFT BODIES, QUIET REBELLIONS:
Intimate stages where tenderness confronts truth and vulnerability becomes form.
Written by Laura Acosta
The Theatre of Intimacy, where the Everyday Becomes Revelation.
To look at Vanessa Van Meerhaeghe’s paintings is to enter a theatre of intimacy where every gesture is amplified, every object loaded with meaning, and every colour vibrates with emotional charge. Her protagonists — predominantly women — occupy bedrooms, living rooms, riverbanks and thresholds, inhabiting spaces that are both domestic and psychological. They are rendered in saturated pinks and reds, with elongated limbs and wide, alert eyes, yet what distinguishes them is not their stylisation, but their startling self-possession.
These figures do not perform for an external gaze. Reclining on patterned beds, seated at tables, bathing in shallow water, or exchanging glances in front of a mirror, they inhabit their bodies with a quiet, grounded authority.
Chromatic Intensity — Colour as Emotional Architecture
Colour is the first agent of transformation in Vanessa’s world. Her chromatic universe is unapologetically bold: fuchsia bodies against midnight blue walls, coral flesh on orange grounds, crimson flowers bursting from deep blue vases. These tones are not merely decorative; they operate as carriers of emotion and psychological intensity. Skin, in her paintings, is not naturalistic; it is a surface of affect.
Vanessa constructs her compositions with theatrical precision. Each scene is staged, yet never feels artificial. Objects act as co-protagonists: blinds half-drawn, handwritten notes, symbolic vases, masks, combs, scissors. They ground the works in the everyday while opening doors to symbolic meaning.
Hashtag selflove
Dear Mary
Rituals of care and companionship
A defining gesture in Vanessa’s practice is the depiction of female companionship: one woman brushing another’s hair, two figures resting in mirrored postures, a shared glance in front of patterned blinds. These scenes reject narratives of rivalry; instead, they affirm solidarity and emotional reciprocity.
Repetition—of faces, poses, objects—creates visual echoes, suggesting the fluidity of selfhood and the intimate bonds that shape it.
Mask me later
Flower
The last temptation
Everything starts on Monday
Soft Bodies, Sharp Truths — Vulnerability as a Form of Agency
Even when wounded — pierced by an arrow, exhausted, teary-eyed — Vanessa’s protagonists refuse to be reduced to victimhood. Her work dismantles the historical trope of the passive female subject by granting her women interiority and agency, even in moments of apparent fragility.
Repetition plays a crucial role: women appear in pairs or multiples, echoing each other’s features as if they were versions of the same self. These mirrored figures resist narratives of rivalry and instead emphasise care, solidarity, and shared emotional labour.
Natural remedies
Masks, Metaphors, and the Quiet Labour of Truth
The recurring mask motif encapsulates Vanessa’s exploration of performed identity. Held at arm’s length or placed on a table, the mask questions: Who am I beneath the role? What is revealed when the performance cracks?
These scenes expose the subtle emotional pressures placed upon the contemporary subject — particularly the female one — to perform coherence, desirability, independence, composure. Vanessa reveals the emotional cost of those performances, while simultaneously depicting the quiet strength required to dismantle them.
Shallow water
Domesticity as Soft Rebellion — The Power of the Everyday
Despite the pressure her protagonists face, humour flickers at the edges of Vanessa’s world — a gentle irony in their poses, their patterned textiles, their self-awareness. Her palette prevents the images from collapsing into despair; instead, tenderness becomes a form of resistance.
Vanessa invites us to recognise ourselves in these interiors: the rooms where we have cried, rested, hoped, loved; the masks we have worn; the truths we have confronted. Her domestic spaces become sites of revelation and rebellion.
Here, in the fragile theatre of daily life, the softest bodies articulate the sharpest truths.
PRESS VERSION — VANESSA VAN MEERHAEGHE
Vanessa Van Meerhaeghe paints luminous emotional interiors where women inhabit their vulnerabilities with strength. Using vibrant reds, pinks, and deep blues, she stages gestures of rest, care, and introspection. Masks, flowers, letters, and symbolic objects anchor her scenes, exploring the tension between self-presentation and authenticity. Her protagonists confront their emotional truths without apology, transforming tenderness into a form of resistance. Vanessa’s world is one where intimacy becomes power, and where the domestic transforms into a theatre of quiet rebellion.
—Laura Acosta
Curator & Creative Director, Arttyco
Written in Barcelona, September 2025
✉ info@arttyco.com | 🌐 www.arttyco.com | IG: @arttyco
Laura Acosta, Curator and Creative Director at Arttyco, combines her background in architecture, interior design, and cultural management to create accessible and engaging contemporary art experiences. Her multidisciplinary approach emphasizes spatial awareness and deep audience connection.
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