The Bernier/Eliades Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Stefan De Jaeger in Brussels, Diversions. The opening will take place on Friday, November 14, 2025, from 17:00 to 21:00, in the presence of the artist. De Jaeger’s practice encompasses painting, drawing, and mixed-media compositions, engaging deeply with the notions of perception, gesture, and transformation. His work traverses the threshold between image and emotion, continuously questioning the relationship between the physical act of creation and the intangible traces it leaves behind.

For this exhibition, the artist has created a whole new body of work ranging from works on paper to large scale paintings. These works form a dialogue between the immediacy of gesture and the quiet structure of reflection. The works on paper unfold as rhythmic constellations: marks, lines, and erasures that reveal a spontaneous choreography of movement. The paintings, by contrast, open broader chromatic fields where pigment, texture, and transparency resonate in layered harmony. Together, they offer a visual terrain that resists narration yet conveys a coherent inner order, a dynamic balance between control and surrender, impulse and contemplation.

Working with brushes, graphite, ink, and pigment on canvas or paper, he alternates between impulsive gestures and meticulous reworking. The artist’s mark functions as a language of emotion rather than depiction. His compositions evolve through layering, scraping, and repetition, each action leaving behind an echo of movement and thought. Rejecting digital mediation, De Jaeger insists on the primacy of the hand and the slowness of making, allowing his works to emerge as records of time, memory, and inner rhythm.

Stefan De Jaeger (b. 1957) lives and works in Brussels. Initially trained in graphic and photographic techniques, he became known in the 1980s for his experimental use of Polaroid processes before turning fully to painting and drawing in the 1990s. He has had solo exhibitions internationally, among others, at Musée d’ Ixelles (Brussels, Belgium), Centre d’ Art Contemporain (Calais, France), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels, Belgium), and Museum of Photography (Charleroi, Belgium). Selected group exhibitions includeParrish Art Museum (New York, USA), Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, USA), and Kunsthalle & Kunstmuseum (Bern, Switzerland). De Jaeger’s practice continues to explore the interplay between material presence and emotional resonance, offering viewers spaces of quiet intensity and reflection.