Valerie De Smedt – What the Night Remembers

Valerie De Smedt (b. 1999, BE) paints moments suspended between what has already happened and what is about to happen: a church glowing red against a black sky, a hand gripping a rosary in the dark, a pair of taillights disappearing into a forest. Nothing fully resolves; each panel is a fragment held mid-air, a still lifted from a film we never see in full. Working in oil and acrylic on wooden panels, De Smedt builds her images the way Flemish painting has built images for centuries: through underdrawing, grisaille, glazing and clair-obscur. The layered, slow-moving technique is not a nostalgic gesture toward the old masters; it mirrors, for her, the way memory itself accumulates: never all at once, always shifting even as it settles. Night is the recurring stage of her work; not mere darkness, but an ambiguous state where the sacred and the threatening, tenderness and violence, the familiar and the estranged sit side by side. It places her within a lineage that runs from Caravaggio's tenebrism through Belgian Symbolism's interiors to the uncanny stillness found in painters like Michaël Borremans and the staged tension of cinematic photographers such as Gregory Crewdson. Religious iconography; a cross, a rosary, a votive candle; recurs not as devotion but as a study in how symbols keep their charge outside of context. De Smedt is drawn to how a single cross in an empty room can fill it with meaning, and to how the repetition of ritual echoes the repetition inherent to painting itself: both quietly obsessive, both a form of incantation. Underneath it all runs the unheimlich; the uncanny surfacing from within the familiar rather than arriving from outside it. Her non-naturalistic palette records not how things look but how they feel, tipping the visible world almost imperceptibly out of true. Her paintings function less as isolated images than as passages from one continuous, half-remembered journey; asking to be read the way one reads a dream the morning after: details slightly wrong, meaning slightly unfixed, feeling entirely intact. It is this openness, held inside a technique of real discipline, that makes her paintings keep their secret, and it's precisely this that makes them more powerful. Her work has recently been presented in the solo exhibitions After Hours at 3J Art Gallery (2026) and collaborated in group exhibitions such as; After Painting After Painting (After Painting) at PLUS-ONE, Playgrounds: Deuce at PLUS-ONE, Diskussie at DISKUS Aalst, and Spicy Margarita at Katapultt. Valerie De Smedt is represented by PLUS-ONE Projects.