PRESS RELEASE
Florian Tomballe: Arcadian Echoes
1 August - 5 October 2025
Opening: Friday 1 August, 15:00-20:00
Location: Buysse Gallery, Zeedijk-Het-Zoute 700, Knokke-Heist
Buysse Gallery presents Arcadian Echoes, a two-level solo exhibition by Belgian artist Florian Tomballe. This presentation marks a new chapter in the gallery's program by embracing contemporary figuration through sculpture and drawing forms that interrogate the body as fragment, memory, and archetype.
The exhibition also marks Buysse Gallery's first collaboration with the Antwerp-based platform PLUS-ONE Projects, which operates in an advisory capacity and mediates between collectors and collaborating artists. This dialogue between two independent art intermediaries establishes the framework for a focused solo exhibition in Knokke, to be followed by a related event in Antwerp. Details of this second chapter will be announced during the course of the exhibition.
Arcadian Echoes
The title Arcadian Echoes evokes an imagined landscape not a utopia, but a temporal fold. Tomballe's works resonate like mythic afterimages: bodies half-remembered, forms suspended between antiquity and now. Through sculpture and drawing, the artist introduces a visual language built from deconstruction figuration not as image, but as process. Form becomes fragment. Surface becomes a site of memory.
Tomballe's practice draws from a classical foundation, yet resists stylistic nostalgia. References to the Greek Kouros or Roman gravitas are not quoted but reprocessed. His sculptures emerge through intuitive deformation: physical, unstable, and provisional. Echoes of Thomas Houseago are present in the open construction of the body; Picasso appears not as aesthetic influence but as structural method. His drawings sparse, incised, deliberate recall Jean Cocteau, where line becomes silhouette and suggestion.
"My hands and emotions have a greater knowledge than what I determine with my head."
- Florian Tomballe
The exhibition unfolds across two levels. On the main floor, key sculptural works are positioned in active relation to the gallery's architecture. A black-and-white wall sculpture graphic and frontal anchors the street view, while smaller works punctuate the window zones. The scenography avoids spectacle. It favors restraint, transparency, and rhythm.
Below, a concentrated selection of drawings isolates Tomballe's graphic language. These are not studies, but spatial objects on paper. Line becomes gesture; repetition becomes structure.
Tomballe's figures do not sit within chronology. They are not images of the body, but vessels shaped by material knowledge, history, and instinct. Their archetypal quality is not symbolic, but procedural: each work holds its meaning in how it was made, not in what it resembles.
Press & Inquiries
Louis Buysse
louis@buysse.gallery
+32 (0) 479 57 03 27
www.buysse.gallery
Zeedijk-Het-Zoute 700, 8300 Knokke-Heist, Belgium
