rodolphe janssen is pleased to present Another Life, a new body of work by Alvin Ong that bears witness to the transition, and recovery from the artist’s self-confessed burnout in 2025. What has emerged are beguiling layers of multiplicity and texture. Bodies thin into ethereal translucency. they blend and bleed. Individual faces can be made out, encased in their own melancholy, sometimes contorted into split, or fractured souls. Heads serve as receptacles for other tableaux. Eyes are deliberately omitted or painted over like a blindfold or reflected surface. 

Screens are a recurrent motif, implicating the viewer as spectator. a recent evolution in his practice is the introduction of texts and embedded rhinestones. they draw reference to the devotional act of painting and the religious iconography he was exposed to growing up. In Residues, a new series on found antique blinds and signboards from Singapore, fragments of historically painted symbols, text and imagery are imaginatively reconfigured alongside lived experience, real and imagined. painting emerges as palimpsest, but also an act of queering, in the artist’s words, “they hold space not just for the body, but also for imagining: that we could have lived many lives, and many versions of ourselves.”

With Dressage Ruined by Puffers, Belgian artist Lisa Vlaemminck presents a new series of shaped paintings at rodolphe janssen. Cut from wood into recognisable silhouettes—a tooth, a hairstyle, a slice of cheese, a chicken leg—the works establish a relation between the physical form of the support and the image painted onto it. The two do not necessarily correspond. A recognisable contour can carry an unrelated image, while the image can alter how the contour is perceived.

In Vlaemminck’s work, shape and subject enter into an oblique relationship, sometimes echoing one another, but more often refusing to line up. Familiar forms operate almost like visual fragments or signs, while the paintings remain elusive. What initially appears legible becomes strange through a shift in scale, context or meaning. This process of extraction and recontextualisation extends from the still life to the visual language of everyday life, advertising and popular culture, where objects are selected, arranged and aesthetically charged.

The shaped panel occupies a space between object and image, body and landscape. Vlaemminck combines a fascination with the physicality of objects and painting with the increasingly weightless, digital nature of images. Forms that circulate as pixels or visual fragments acquire a physical body, while tangible objects are translated into images and signs.

Food, anatomy and consumer objects occupy a similar space between attraction and repulsion. Removed from their functional context, they become images, while images retain associations with things that can be touched, eaten or handled. This recalls the logic of the still life, where objects are isolated, composed and charged with meanings beyond their use. In a culture saturated with images of things to desire, consume and possess, repetition and displacement can turn attraction into excess, discomfort or rejection.

The distinction between subject and object consequently becomes unstable. The abject appears in this space between the two: neither fully object nor fully subject. A bodily fragment can become an object of contemplation; an everyday object can acquire the status of a fetish; an image can retain the suggestion of something physical, edible or corporeal.

Shape, image, material and association operate through shifting relations. Their interaction recalls John Conway’s Game of Life, where simple rules of interaction generate patterns and complex structures . In Vlaemminck’s paintings, elements similarly support, obstruct and transform one another. The paintings construct small worlds in which the rules of one form can become the disturbance of another.

Dressage Ruined by Puffers describes a world governed by rules that are constantly being interrupted by the forms they produce. What is brought into shape can swell, shift or turn against its own organisation.