Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present Architectura Discordiae, the fourth solo exhibition by Belgian artist Renato Nicolodi at Kanaal. In this exhibition, Nicolodi invites visitors to slow down and experience space in a renewed way. Through sculpture, painting, and video, he explores the fragile balance between human ambition and impermanence, between what we build and what ultimately remains. Centred on his new installation Hybris, the exhibition offers an immersive encounter with architecture as both a physical and emotional landscape, inviting reflection on how we inhabit, shape, and imagine the spaces around us.

In Nicolodi’s work, architecture is never merely a structure. It becomes a container of memory, a mirror of human desire and a record of the inevitable decay that shadows our ambitions. His forms evoke corridors and stairways leading to closed thresholds, monumental façades concealing inner voids and spaces that shift between presence and absence. Each work is a meditation on time, silence and the deeper dimension of space.

At the centre of the exhibition stands Hybris, a new large-scale installation inspired by the myth of the Tower of Babel. Visitors first encounter an imposing wall of stacked concrete blocks. Only by moving around it does the structure reveal its full nature: a tower, unfinished and open at the back, inviting exploration. Inside, the space is intimate and austere. The sound of footsteps and the texture of concrete create a heightened awareness of scale and presence, where invitation and unease coexist. As Nicolodi explains, "Hybris is a reflection on our society. It is a monument to the human urge to build, to connect, and to create order, and at the same time to the fragility and impermanence that shadow these ambitions.” The tower becomes a social and philosophical metaphor, engaging with cycles of creation and destruction, power and vulnerability, and the illusions of universal order.

Artists: Renato Nicolodi