Kasper Sonne’s People Are Strange Paints the Distance Between Us
At MARUANI MERCIER in Brussels, Kasper Sonne places contemporary figures inside luminous landscapes where beauty, isolation and belonging remain delicately unresolved. Some figures belong to a landscape. Kasper Sonne’s do not. They stand elegantly within expanses of water, sky and spectral light, yet something keeps them separate from their surroundings. Their clothes are sharply contemporary. Their poses feel timeless. They appear completely visible, but emotionally somewhere else.
In People Are Strange, opening at MARUANI MERCIER in Brussels on 10 September 2026, Sonne turns that distance into the atmosphere of the exhibition. His elongated figures inhabit natural settings without ever settling into them, creating paintings that feel serene at first glance and quietly unstable the longer one looks.
The elegance of not belonging
The figures in People Are Strange are upright, composed and absorbed in private thought. They rarely meet the viewer’s gaze. Instead, they look away, as though following something beyond the edge of the canvas.
Their solitude does not feel incidental. Sonne gives it a nearly mythic scale, placing each person within a landscape that seems to exist outside ordinary time. Water stretches into lucid planes. Skies glow without revealing a clear source. Contemporary clothes introduce a recognisable social world, but the environments resist location, explanation and narrative certainty.
The calm is not quite comfort. These figures appear in harmony with the landscape and displaced from it at the same time. For Sonne, that contradiction is central. As the artist explains, “I create these characters that have no obvious reason to be in these environments.”
Their presence turns the landscape into a psychological space. The question is no longer simply where they are, but whether they can ever fully belong there, or to one another.
Kasper Sonne, Skull Earring, 2026. Oil on linen, 200 x 150 cm. © Kasper Sonne. Courtesy MARUANI MERCIER, Belgium.
Colour that behaves like weather
Sonne works on unprimed linen, applying thinned oil paint in repeated layers. Pigment seeps directly into the fabric, allowing colour to feel embedded rather than placed on the surface. Other passages are thicker and more physical, carrying the visible energy of the brush.
This contrast gives the paintings their distinctive tension. Translucent fields of colour create an atmosphere that seems to hum around the figures, while denser marks bring the body sharply forward. The surface moves between absorption and resistance, softness and insistence.
Colour behaves almost like weather. It surrounds the figures, changes the emotional temperature of the scene and makes the landscape feel less like a fixed place than a state of mind.
Vampire and the cinema of inwardness
Vampire deepens the exhibition’s cinematic mood.
A figure in a vivid orange coat stands among dark trees beside luminous water. The setting moon glows close to the horizon, while other, less identifiable sources of light seem to touch the face and clothing. The image feels suspended between dusk and dream.
The protagonist turns towards the light, but his expression remains difficult to read. Sonne gradually constructs and reworks the face, searching for connection with a character who remains deliberately enigmatic. Eccentricity and introspection occupy the same features.
The result resembles a paused film rather than a completed story. Something may have just happened, or may be about to happen, but the painting refuses to explain which. Its emotional force comes from that withholding.
Across People Are Strange, isolation is not presented as emptiness. It becomes a condition through which the possibility of connection can be examined.
Sonne’s characters are not anonymous, yet they remain unknowable. Their clothing offers clues about personality and time, but the landscapes loosen those clues from any stable context. They are vividly contemporary and strangely untethered, close enough to recognise but too distant to possess.
That tension is what gives the new paintings their psychological charge. Sonne does not resolve the distance between person and place, or between one person and another. He lets the distance remain visible.
Kasper Sonne, Vampire, 2026. Oil on linen, 220 x 170 cm. © Kasper Sonne. Courtesy MARUANI MERCIER, Belgium.
Exhibition details
Kasper Sonne: People Are Strange
10 September to 31 October 2026
MARUANI MERCIER, Brussels Louise
Avenue Louise 430
1050 Brussels, Belgium
Gallery information: https://maruanimercier.com/
Images © Kasper Sonne. Courtesy MARUANI MERCIER, Belgium.