Florian Tomballe & Marius Ghita: Silent Forms

At first encounter, the practices of Florian Tomballe and Marius Ghita appear to unfold through distinct formal languages. Sculpture and painting operate through different material conditions: solidity and atmosphere, contour and suspension, structure and perception. Yet within Silent Forms, both practices gradually reveal a shared attention toward fragmentation, absence, and the persistence of incomplete images.

 

Rather than constructing direct narratives, the exhibition moves through intervals of proximity and distance. Forms emerge slowly, dissolve again, and return in altered states. Tomballe's sculptural vocabulary - reduced, fractured, and archetypal - approaches the body as both structure and residue. His wooden sculptures, acrylic reliefs, and works on paper oscillate between figuration and abstraction, carrying subtle echoes of Mediterranean antiquity, Cubist reduction, and post-war European sculpture without becoming illustrative or historically fixed.

 

Ghita's paintings introduce another temporality into the exhibition. His compositions unfold through atmospheric shifts, suspended gestures, and psychologically unstable spaces. Figures and interiors appear familiar yet inaccessible, hovering somewhere between memory and invention. Rather than resolving into narrative clarity, the paintings remain open, allowing perception to drift between intimacy and estrangement.

 

The exhibition does not seek to resolve these differences. Instead, it constructs a slower dialogue between material presence and mental projection. Sculptures interrupt spatial rhythms while paintings extend them. Empty space becomes active within the scenography, allowing each work to retain autonomy while entering subtle resonance with neighbouring forms.

 

Light plays a central role throughout the exhibition. Tomballe's tactile surfaces absorb and structure space differently from the luminosity within Ghita's paintings. This contrast creates a measured rhythm between weight and apparition, density and silence.

 

Within the context of Buysse Gallery, Silent Forms continues an interest in restraint, observation, and material specificity. Rather than producing a thematic conclusion, the exhibition proposes a contemplative environment in which forms persist through fragments, echoes, and gradual perception.

 

Detail of Blind bird, wide empty land (2026) by Marius Ghita, revealing a fragment of a wing suspended between a barren landscape and mountainous form, where themes of decay, shelter, and permanence emerge through layered oil paint and restrained tonal transitions.