Eldorado

03.04 - 16.05.2025

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Kunstraum, Chemin des Pins 13, 1180 Brussels

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Artists : Lucile Bertrand, Céline Cuvelier, Diego Herman, Charlotte Quinonero and Barthélémy Toguo

Curator : Valentine Himpens-David

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The exhibition Eldorado gathers five artists and explores the notion of Eldorado in a contemporary context, examining the hopes and challenges tied to migration, borders, and the promises of a better elsewhere.

Lucile Bertrand employs a minimalist and refined language to express the violence of conflicts, the precariousness of migratory journeys, and the exploitation of natural and human resources. Her installations and drawings depict a fractured world of inequalities, while allowing a fragile, silent poetry to emerge. Céline Cuvelier questions the fabrication of contemporary Eldorados through globalized economies and social structures. Immersing herself in marginalized environments—prisons, migrant camps, psychiatric institutions—she exposes the tensions between dream and reality, the longing for elsewhere, and the brutality of the present. Diego Herman explores the physical and symbolic boundaries that shape our living spaces. Through his paintings of urban landscapes marked by fences, barriers, and exclusion zones, he challenges the power dynamics governing the free movement of bodies and identities. Charlotte Quinonero works with themes of dreams and memory, capturing those suspended moments where the past and the imaginary intertwine. In her works, Eldorado becomes an intimate space, an inner quest where memory redraws the contours of possibility. Barthélémy Toguo, between dreamlike vision and political engagement, sheds light on the contradictions of mobility. Goods circulate freely, but what about people? His monumental stamp sculptures, installations, and drawings denounce bureaucratic obstacles and the paradoxes of globalization, making the invisible visible and revealing the tensions between hope and oppression.

Together, these artists sketch a subjective map of the modern Eldorado—between pursuit and disillusionment, exile and belonging, promise and defiance. Will the promised land be the one we have long imagined?