Galerie Nathalie Obadia is currently presenting j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. – Et je l’ai trouvée amère, Sacha Cambier de Montravel’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s Brussels location. Having followed the artist’s evolution closely over the past few years—and having thoroughly enjoyed doing so—I was eager to see how this latest body of work would unfold. Across eleven paintings, Cambier de Montravel transports us into a snow-covered, post-industrial Flemish landscape, where beauty stumbles, slips, and occasionally bites back. The setting draws heavily from the sixteenth-century Flemish tradition, with Brueghel the Elder never far from view. Human and canine figures populate these eerie scenes, yielding to gestures at once sensual and destructive. Beneath the deceptively pristine snow, a quiet violence simmers.
Cambier de Montravel’s constellation of references is broad and unabashedly erudite: Bosch, Brueghel, Caravaggio, Dürer, Saedeleer, Van Heil, De Vos, Patinier. The artist’s Belgian origins and training at the École des Beaux‑Arts in Paris and La Cambre in Brussels form the foundation of this visual vocabulary. The works—painted on wood panels whose grain remains visible beneath the pigment—recall older craft traditions. Their sculpted frames suspend each painting in a peculiar temporal corridor, an anachronism where past and present overlap—making me contemplate the archetypal form of what would be an obsolete frame, but coated in a contemporary black, reminiscent of a Ronald Bladen or Thomas J Price sculpture.
Historical echoes surface throughout the exhibition. Cambier de Montravel’s reworking of Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocents, transposed onto the village of Esplechin, locates past violence within the architectural shadows of the coal‑mining era. The monumental tree at the center—borrowed, enlarged, and aged—stands as though it has survived everything from the Duke of Alba’s horrors to contemporary persecutions of queer identity. “There will always be winters,” these paintings murmur—and not only the meteorological kind. From political winters to personal winters. Winters marked by the sin, shame, and burden of being who we are and what we are.
Alongside these historical layers, the exhibition opens a window onto contemporary queer experience. Desire, particularly in its more perilous forms, emerges as a central thread. Chemsex appears not as a sensationalist subject but as a metaphor for conflict: freedom and danger, intimacy and risk, liberation and self‑erasure. Bodies half‑hidden behind windows—under the lingering shadow of the Church—cling to fragile moments of tenderness. Outside, stray or lifeless dogs approach a frozen puddle, mirroring the vulnerability of their human counterparts. Judith Butler’s reflection that “the body is always a site of resistance” echoes through these scenes; here, that resistance feels both urgent and unbearably fragile.
The exhibition’s title, taken from Rimbaud—“I sat Beauty on my knees. – And I found her bitter”—makes no attempt to console. As Hervé Guibert observed during the AIDS crisis, beauty’s cruelty is sharpest when it once promised salvation. Cambier de Montravel stages this tension with precision: beauty and bitterness, desire and dissolution. Yet even here, a sliver of dark humor remains—perhaps in the absurd resilience of the dogs, or in the way Flemish rooftops persistently peek through the gloom, as if saying: We’ve survived worse. And maybe, in this theater of snow and ruin, that is its own kind of truth.
For more information, please consult Galerie Nathalie Obadia’s website here.
Last Updated on December 4, 2025
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
