*Sol Año, Moonens Foundation, Brussels, Belgium. [Vernissage: 03 September; Dates: 04 - 13 September 2026]

Tramaine de Senna

Sol Año

4–13 September 2026

Moonens Foundation
Rue Philippe de Champagne 50
1000 Brussels, Belgium

Working between Antwerp and California, Tramaine de Senna has long investigated what she describes as the migration of forms and the construction of appearances: how images, objects and cultural forms move between places, materials and histories, and how their surfaces can obscure, transform or reinvent their origins.

Sol Año brings these concerns into new ceramic and textile works alongside a selection of recent ceramic maquettes. Fragments of bodies, architecture, clothing, plants and the built environment are displaced and recombined. A tree becomes architecture; drapery becomes rigid; a cigarette assumes the position of a post. Forms alternate between figure, support and ornament, retaining traces of previous identities while becoming something else.

These transformations are not entirely benign. Violence has long existed beneath the exuberant surfaces of de Senna's work—not necessarily as something represented directly, but as something absorbed, displaced and recirculated through form. Popular culture can operate as a blanket over violent histories, making their images familiar, pleasurable and repeatable even as their origins become obscured. Nuclear destruction becomes Godzilla; histories of conquest become the mythology of the American West; bodily vulnerability can return through fashion, ornament, humor or fantasy.

In Sol Año, this tension moves through the cactus, the cigarette, the tree and the fragmented body. Each carries different possibilities of attraction and injury, pleasure and threat, protection and exposure. The tree is simultaneously landscape, body and structure; the cactus protects itself through the possibility of injury; the cigarette joins pleasure and sensation to burning and bodily harm. Bodies appear in fragments, refusing the stability of a complete or immediately legible identity.

Material transformation complicates these associations further. Ceramic imitates cloth, clothing, paper and skin, fixing things ordinarily soft, flexible or ephemeral into permanent form. In three large sewn compositions, the relationship is partly reversed. Denim, ticking and camouflage are cut apart and reorganized through repetition, while seams, fading and traces of previous use remain visible. Soft materials assume an architectural and diagrammatic order.

The textiles also return the idea of the blanket to material form. Familiar fabrics associated with clothing, domestic life, labor, military concealment and popular culture become surfaces upon which histories can be simultaneously carried and covered.

Across Sol Año, what something looks like, what it has been, and what it might mean are never necessarily the same. Forms migrate between California and Europe, private memory and shared culture, attraction and repulsion, body and object, landscape and architecture. Appearance becomes a temporary condition rather than a fixed identity.

The works remain deliberately unresolved: vivid, humorous and seductive even when something more difficult persists beneath their surfaces.

Vernissage:
Thursday 3 September, 18:00–21:00

Exhibition:
4–13 September 2026
14:00–18:00
Closed Monday and Tuesday
Viewing also possible by appointment

Finissage:
Sunday 13 September, 14:00–18:00

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