Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel

The Wet Wing

Z33, Hasselt, Belgium 29/03/25 – 24/08/25

Curated by Kevin Gallagher

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s collaborative art practice evokes a contemporary pastoral world through a monumental approach to craft practices. In their work, farm animals, local plants, man-made objects, or human anatomy are rendered into technically challenging materials such as embroidery, oak, marble, or silk. Probing divisions between nature and culture, they look towards tools, materials and imagery that explore our kinship with, and separation from the natural world. They place a high value in artisanal techniques to produce their artworks, often developing bespoke processes for the creation of singular works.

For their upcoming solo exhibition at Z33, Dewar and Gicquel are embarking on the production of a new monumental silk painting, which will stream through the five galleries of the historic Vleugel 58. For this epic painting, the duo have chosen to depict a river scene with freshwater fish. As companions to this immersive aquatic scene, Dewar and Gicquel will be presenting a new series of sculptures made of stoneware ceramics and pink marble.

A catfish slides along the river floor, a yellow light shimmers across the water, smoke billows from a brick chimney. Human hands feed the fire, log after log. The furnace transforms wood into heat, slowly firing stoneware ceramics. River water, once mixed within the wet clay, is burned off and turned into steam.

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s collaborative practice employs traditional craft tools, materials and techniques in order to explore humankind’s kinship with – and division from – nature. The handcrafted works probe our relationship to production and consumption: what is the value of artisanal skill in an age of automation? What does a rural or locally-situated approach to art making mean in a networked, globalised artistic sphere?

For their solo exhibition The Wet Wing at Z33, Dewar and Gicquel present a series of site-specific works including a monumental silk painting, stoneware ceramic jars and hand-carved sculptures in pink marble. The painting streams through the five galleries of the historic Vleugel 58. Depicting a river scene with freshwater fish and vegetation, it is formed through seeping blobs of colourful ink. The painting’s deliberate placement within the galleries encourages visitors to follow a set path, mirroring the current of a river.

The Wet Wing proposes a realm of impermanence and constant change: slippery substances and fluid shapes. Along the way, we encounter forms in transition: connected by material affinities, deepened by artisanal techniques.

A green glimmer greets viewers at the entrance to the exhibition as we catch sight of the monumental silk painting. Underwater vegetation such as lily pads and pondweed plants appear first within the murky scene. The painting was produced in several stages in the artists’ Brussels studio. The composition was first drawn onto silk with water-repellent gutta, creating outlines to corral the flow of watery ink. A wonderfully imperfect system, the ink sometimes leaks out of one shape and invades another. Unique textures and visual depth is achieved through the use of sprayed water and bleeding colours. The painting, like a river, is a mixture of stoppages and flows, winding along currents to its next destination.

Against this backdrop stands a single flipper carved in pink marble. An appendix to the human foot, the flipper indicates both our lack of aquatic adaptations and our desire to imitate marine life. Between nature and culture, the flipper acts as a tool for visitors navigating The Wet Wing.

In the second gallery, two central figures emerge. One is a freshwater mirror carp depicted in the silk painting. Dotted with textured scales, it appears as if caught in an evolutionary transition, migrating between worlds. The other is a stoneware vessel adorned with an amalgamation of human torsos and snails. This vessel is the first of six, which increase in size across the galleries, creating a sense of growth and progression. These ceramics, crafted in a wood-fired kiln built by the artists in rural Brittany, feature irregular watery glazes that enhance the material’s riverine origin, and also hint at the water they could potentially carry.

Moving through the galleries, the immersive arrangement of murals enhances the sensation of being submerged. A school of shimmering mirror carp emerge from the riverbed. Known for their smooth, silky bellies, with texture that is more similar to that of human skin than that of other fish. The shared texture of the carp skin and the silk painting further enhance a feeling of mimesis and interconnection.

In the final, largest gallery, a fourteen-metre-long painting of a catfish dominates the space. The catfish, like the carp, is a bottom-dweller. With its long whiskers the catfish manoeuvres along the river bed, near the mud, clay, and silt. Accompanying this gigantic fish are two marble sculptures composed of snail shells, human torsos and pectoral muscles. As if dug out of the earth, their clumpy forms might even recall regurgitalite, the fossilised remains of animal stomach contents.

Interestingly, marble too has an aquatic origin: it is formed from the sediment of ancient oceans and transformed by high temperatures and pressures over the course of millennia. There is a material flow to the elements of the exhibition: water, silt, clay, ceramics, rock, crustaceans, fish, flesh, blood. Taken together as a mise-en-scene, they become a playful testimony to Aristotle's concept of matter: everything physical is made of the same basic substance.

Through a fluid underwater prism, The Wet Wing reveals the subtle connections that link species, materials, and ideas, questioning our place within the built environment and the natural world. Created both as a specific response to the architectural space of Vleugel 58 and as a continuation of their artistic enquiries, Dewar and Gicquel’s immersive waterscape invites reflection on modalities of production and representation. The artworks synergise and expand the logics of depiction and form: are we entering an aquatic landscape, a geological time capsule or a hall of decorative arts? Materially charged and physically demanding, the artists’ commitment to craft is undeniable. To craft is to flow, through twists and turns, through sweat, labour, and time. To craft is to give shape, and to be shaped by the process of life.

— Kevin Gallagher