With Capsules, Luxembourg Art Week takes over vacant spaces, store windows, and façades in the city center. Each activated space will be visible from the street around the clock.
Capsules benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Val Smets
It Happened Tomorrow
Location
23, Grand-Rue, L-1661 Luxembourg
With the kind support of the Fondation du Pélican
It Happened Tomorrow is a site-specific installation that merges painting, sculptural forms, and natural elements within a vitrine during Luxembourg Art Week 2025, as part of the Capsule program. A large-scale image printed on fabric serves as a backdrop: a visual that pushes beyond its edges, inviting the viewer into another dimension. In the foreground, oversized mushroom sculptures appear to emerge from the print itself, challenging conventional perspectives and extending the painting into the real world. To ground these surreal volumes, Val Smets is incorporating fallen branches gathered with the support of Guillaume d’Outremont (GDO Project). These elements, suspended or placed on the floor, bring an organic, grounded presence into the composition. The mushrooms evoke the fantastic and the dreamlike; the branches introduce a raw, tactile layer that speaks to the cycles of nature and the persistence of what is real. Together, they create a tension that reflects the fragile balance between our projections and the actual world around us. The title, It Happened Tomorrow, points to this fluidity in our perception of time, an acknowledgment that the past and future continually shape the present. By weaving together surreal and natural elements, the project creates a layered space of encounter that is both personal and collective, questioning how we connect to our surroundings and to each other.
The relationship between perception and reality is elegantly expressed through the metaphor of how we see color. Through her paintings, Brussels-based artist Val Smets (b. 1991, Luxembourg) tunes into this real-yet-mystifying phenomenon, transforming her sensorial experiences into vibrant, immersive landscapes. Having initially focused on the painterly exploration of fungi as a recurring motif for these interrogations, her visual language has expanded into kaleidoscopic compositions which are at once psychedelic, gestural, and colorful. Resisting confines of genre much like our mycelial neighbors seem to resist laws of nature, Smets slips fluidly between expressive brushstrokes and surreal symbolism, a reflection of time in the studio that is both energetic and intimate. The result is an œuvre that is deeply subjective, unself-conscious, and open. Relying on a range of references from naturalist philosophy, literature to Jungian psychoanalysis, she explores the mutual dependence of species, inviting viewers to question their place in the cosmic web and the relationship to the Self and Other. Her practice challenges traditional power dynamics both in subject matter and technique by playing with perspective and harmonizing convergent methods from color field painting and post-impressionism. Favoring large formats and working without preparatory sketches, her paintings are the product of an intense psychological process. Working with oil directly on stretched canvas, she links painting with memory and reflects synesthesia of sight, sound, and scent. Playing with psychic automatism, she draws out unexpected connections and narratives, showing how shifts in perception can alter outcomes, a stray mark becomes a meaningful element.
Interview of Val Smets
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