Yeonju Son & Brigitte Marionneau

Buysse Gallery presents “Resonant Silence,” a duo exhibition of works by Yeonju Son (Korea/UK) and Brigitte Marionneau (France), curated by Louis Buysse.

Resonant Silence brings together the practices of Yeonju Son and Brigitte Marionneau in a dialogue defined not by assertion, but by the presence of absence. Across painting and sculpture, both artists explore how form, surface, and gesture can be held in suspension-revealing the subtle tensions between trace and void, weight and breath, memory and forgetting.

Working from divergent cultural and generational coordinates-Son between London and Seoul, Marionneau in rural France-each artist develops a quiet yet insistent material language. Son’s layered surfaces register the sedimentation of emotion through acts of scratching, rubbing, and repetition; her paintings are not expressions of image, but fields of transformation, where time accumulates as residue. In contrast, Marionneau constructs her forms through the slow architecture of air and clay. Smoke-fired and pared down to their essential mass, her vessels and monoliths do not declare meaning-they hold it, sealed within.

Installation View of "Resonant Silence" with Yeonju Son & Brigitte Marionneau at Buysse Gallery in Knokke, 2025 © The Artists, Image Courtesy Buysse Gallery
Installation View of “Resonant Silence” with Yeonju Son & Brigitte Marionneau at Buysse Gallery in Knokke, 2025 © The Artists, Image Courtesy Buysse Gallery
Installation View of "Resonant Silence" with Yeonju Son & Brigitte Marionneau at Buysse Gallery in Knokke, 2025 © The Artists, Image Courtesy Buysse Gallery
Installation View of “Resonant Silence” with Yeonju Son & Brigitte Marionneau at Buysse Gallery in Knokke, 2025 © The Artists, Image Courtesy Buysse Gallery

The exhibition unfolds with an emphasis on negative space and scenographic restraint. Each work is given room to breathe. The gallery becomes a container of intervals: between black and white, interior and exterior, permanence and change. These are not opposing poles, but states in dialogue-echoing the Buddhist understanding of impermanence that underlies Son’s practice, and the architectural consciousness that informs Marionneau’s sculpture.

The title Resonant Silence refers to the kind of silence that is not mute, but reverberates. It is the silence of lived form-of the air trapped inside Marionneau’s sealed vessels, or the near-erasure of a gesture in Son’s canvas. It draws on concepts from Mono-ha and post-minimalism, while allowing echoes of Cy Twombly’s poetics of surface and asemic mark-making to resonate in the periphery. Both artists embrace what Twombly once described as the “eroded surfaces of time”-offering not declarations, but inscriptions that hover between presence and disappearance.

This exhibition does not resolve into narrative. It proposes no conclusion. It invites a mode of looking that is slow, embodied, and durational. A space where forms do not speak louder, but deeper.

© Text and Photo Courtesy of Buysse Gallery

DETAILS
Yeonju Son & Brigitte Marionneau
31 May → 27 July 2025

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