Théo Ouaki: Marginalia Fabulae is on view at La peau de l’ours, Bruxelles
March 15 – April 25, 2026
Marginalia refers to the figures and annotations that, in the Middle Ages, occupied the margins of manuscripts. Far from being merely decorative, they constituted a parallel space of reading, mobilizing symbols, beliefs, and secondary narratives to comment on the world from its edges, at the margins of the central text.
With Marginalia Fabulae, I reactivate this principle of lateral reading in order to approach contemporary mass and everyday life, understood as ensembles traversed by networks of signs and symbolic structures. The exhibition brings together exclusively ceramic sculptures, wall-mounted high reliefs and figures in the round conceived as material annotations of reality.
The high reliefs unfold as dense, compartmentalized surfaces, evoking systems of organization and circulation. The figures in the round extend this logic: although detached from the wall, they also appear caught within structures that exceed the individual. Together, the works compose a plastic vocabulary grounded in hybridity, proliferation, and the interweaving of bodies and forms.
The grotesque and fabulation, inherited from medieval marginalia, generate here an open symbolic language. Superstition is approached as a mode of thinking through resonance, without omen or univocal interpretation, leaving the viewer free to move between the signs.
Entirely made of ceramic, the works inscribe this fabulation within an archaic and irreversible material historically linked to use and ritual. Marked by gesture and accident, fired clay gives the forms an almost talismanic dimension, where the symbolic settles without ever closing upon itself.
Marginalia Fabulae thus proposes a lateral reading of the present, where the margin becomes an active space for the production of meaning, revealing the symbolic structures that traverse everyday life. These forms take shape within a daily studio practice, nourished by the repetition of gestures and by attention to minor narratives and discreet signs that persist at the edge of the visible.
Text by Théo Ouaki
Contact
info@lapeaudelours.net
La peau de l’ours
Rivoli Building
Rue Emile Claus, 55
1050 Ixelles
Belgium
Photos courtesy of the gallery
