Marilou Dejans (°1997) is a Belgian artist working and living in Brussels and Leuven. She holds a master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Antwerp and has been working in visual arts and theatre.

Her in situ installation called ‘Wood Wide Web’, plays with space as a theatre. By placing her canvasses as a scenography, she paints the space itself and raises formal questions on composition, form, and color.

The harlequin-like protagonists on the portraits show the imagination of a childlike memory. They produce a stillness in time, revealing the fragility of existence and a magic-like quality made by the intuitive act of ‘doing’.

Her practice is based on actions via the experience of the present moment. It creates honest communication without pre-conceptualized intentions—an organic and natural rhythm forms, resembling ecosystems: growth and regeneration.

As she is mesmerized by the communication of ecosystems, there is a question of survival through altruism or egoism. Different species of trees nurture each other while others, like the walnut and Orchidee, suck the life juices from the fungi network that connects the whole forest.

The question of survival is also perhaps one of good and evil. A moral dilemma not only found in humanity but in nature as a whole.

This work is like a gray twilight zone before the catastrophe hits. The grinning mouth of the harlequin: he is the only one able to speak the truth without fear of punishment. It symbolizes humankind’s schizophrenic communication with its surroundings: the brutal, the happy & the sad.