At the Royal Academy, Lyndon Barrois Jr. extends the thread of inquiry first woven in Rosette, his solo project at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2023). For this project, the works open a cinematic arena, conjuring a fictional tale around Lumière, a Belgian art conservator whose role is to safeguard and restore, yet who hovers at the edge of suspicion. Might Lumière also be a forger, orchestrating a quiet deception within the museum walls? Barrois’s paintings and sculptures—interlaced with objects first drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and most recently of the Royal Academy in London—become a constellation of possible clues, gestures toward the secret impulses of this figure.

Within this specific series of work, Barrois re-appropriates the designs of Belgian painter and architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957). Art historian Debora L. Silverman, in her three-part essay Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism (2011–14), traces the darker currents beneath Belgian Art Nouveau, uncovering its entanglements with colonial violence. She notes how van de Velde and his contemporary Victor Horta employed forms that echo tusks and vines, scarified skin and tribal marks, their elegant whiplash lines carrying the spectral energy of the chicotte—a whip of dried hippopotamus hide, once wielded with brutal force against Congolese laborers. These men received commissions from financiers bound to King Leopold’s Congo Free State, entwining aesthetics with the machinery of exploitation.