Joël Riff opens the 2025 season with an invitation to discover asite of production devised by artist Pélagie Gbaguidi, which he imagines as a “Antre” (“Den”) - the exhibition’s title. Gbaguidi has transformed a café in a village outside Brussels into her studio, where she creates pieces whose incandescence shines with its full intensity in the light of La Verrière. Working across multiple formats and mediums, ranging from bags of flour and bedsheets to pages from books and journals, she develops motifs that are marked by a singular frontality even as they are paradoxically infused with what Joël Riff refers to as “a wordless serenity”. A feeling of deep humanity indeed prevails over the painful contexts that Pélagie Gbaguidi evokes through acrylic, wax crayon, charcoal, pastels and pigment. 
At La Verrière, her works are surrounded by furniture made by the Brussels collective Aygo, made up of four young graduates from the Design Academy Eindhoven, the words of French author Sophie Marie Larrouy (FR, b.1984), sculptures by Marianne Berenhaut (BE, b.1934) and embroideries by Hessie (JA, 1933-2017).
Born in Dakar, Senegal in 1965, Pélagie Gbaguidi has lived and worked in Brussels since 2000, with “Antre” marking her first solo exhibition in the Belgian capital.