EN CREUX
At the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, the project En creux accompanies the restoration of the Pulpit of Truth, a Baroque masterpiece by Hendrik Frans Verbrugghen, once praised by Victor Hugo. Marked by the passage of time and the disappearance of several sculpted elements, this emblematic work becomes the starting point for an original reflection on memory, absence, and transmission.
En creux invites artists, students, heritage conservators, and scientists to investigate these voids and imagine new forms for them. Through a collaborative and experimental approach, the project transforms absence into a space for creation and dialogue.
Directed by artists Florian Kiniques and Stephan Balleux, this interdisciplinary laboratory brings together students from ArBA-EsA, KIK-IRPA, and the Cathedral’s Church Fabric within a collaboration that forms part of the celebrations marking the 800th anniversary of the cathedral. Participants are invited to engage in artistic research rooted in contemporary questions of heritage, memory, and transformation. In doing so, past and present are brought into dialogue through a living visual language that contributes to a renewed understanding of our shared heritage.
PARTNERS
KIK-IRPA : Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage
Emmanuelle Mercier : Head of the Conservation-Restoration Workshop for Polychrome Wooden Sculptures.
Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula
Fabrique d'église
Comité GUDULA26
ULB : Université libre de Bruxelles
Muriel Andrin : Film Professor within the Master's Programme in Performing Arts.
Royal Film Archive of Belgium
Arianna Turci : Head of Analog Collections.
GoVR
Guillaume Janssens : Specialist in digitisation technologies and 3D photogrammetry, with particular expertise in heritage applications.
ArBA-EsA : Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the City of Brussels – Higher School of Arts
Stephan Balleux : Artist, professor, and co-head of the Painting Department.
Florian Kiniques : Visual artist, lecturer, and Director of the Collegium of the Royal Academy of Belgium.
Students
Jalaad Ferré & Enora Le Gall
Paul Herbelot
Charlotte Motuelle
Amina Sapozhnikova
Edmée Vouaux
EXHIBITION INSIDE THE CATHEDRAL FROM 20 JUNE : PAUL HERBELOT
“At first, I wanted to reconstruct the missing peacock from the Pulpit of Truth, the carved wooden bird that had disappeared long ago. I imagined finding it transformed, bearing the marks of time. Then, gradually, without really deciding, the project became a house. I had not planned this shift. It was while visualizing the object in my mind that I realized it was no longer a bird at all, and that the house I was building was also, in a certain way, my own.”
A small house, reduced to the almost archaic simplicity of a child’s drawing. An elementary form: a roof, walls, a door. Its wooden structure disappears beneath a thick skin of felt, a porous and organic material composed of mixed wools and mismatched colours, as though time itself had settled upon it in successive layers. The house seems less constructed than clothed, inhabited from within by something living.
The shutters and door, made of stained glass, remain slightly ajar. Through them appears an inner landscape: heavy clouds, a silent storm, a hidden depth. Not a setting, but an interiority. Perhaps a mental space, perhaps a spiritual one. The whole rests upon a mirrored plinth that frees the object from its weight and gives it the fragile appearance of levitation. Within this reflection, the viewer also catches sight of their own image, as if reminded of their presence before the work.
The project emerged less from an idea than from a slow process of condensation. First, a seminar devoted to loss and absence. Then a missing bird from the Pulpit of Truth. Then a house imagined for that bird. Then simply a house. Then a body. Gradually, correspondences began to surface : the reliquary as a vessel, the body as a dwelling place for the sacred, felt as silent flesh. And then that unexpected shift from one word to another - flesh to pulpit - arising without premeditation, as though language itself were quietly continuing the work begun by forms.
The work does not seek to explain or conclude. Rather, it aims to open a space into which anyone, regardless of their relationship to the sacred, to faith, or to the idea of home, may enter freely through their own door.
Biography
Paul Herbelot, born in 2004 in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, is currently completing his Bachelor's degree in Painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the City of Brussels – École supérieure des Arts (ArBA-EsA), after undertaking his secondary artistic education at the Institut Saint-Luc in Tournai.
His work, meticulous and intuitively assembled like precious treasures, takes the form of miniature paintings, fountains, ex-votos, digital drawings, and painted objects. His attention to rich and dazzling surfaces and materials brings his practice close to that of goldsmithing. Woven, painted, assembled, organic, found, or entirely invented materials are transformed in his hands, acquiring a magical and metaphorical dimension.
Limen (2025–2026)
Wood, textile, felt, plastic, glass, oil paint, ink, glass beads, mirror
Dimensions: 58 × 67 × 199 cm