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Night Time

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Night Time  (still)_02

Hans Op de Beeck, still from Night Time, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY. © Hans Op de Beeck

The Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s new show, The Drawing Room, opens tonight at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Among its sculptures and watercolors—painted after nightfall, when “all of the machines in his studio were switched off, the phones stopped ringing, and his staff had left”—is a fifteen-minute animated film, Night Time, produced from some six years of paintings. These three stills give a sense of its perturbing, placid, faintly vatic style: they read as a series of nocturnal establishing shots, each a study in tranquil desolation. They put me in mind of Daniel Lopatin’s synthesizer composition “Zones Without People.” “I just like the spectator to be on his or her own,” the artist told Elephant Magazine in 2011. “Having a fictional or fantasy character sitting there would be like an interruption.”

The Drawing Room shows through May 2.

Night Time  (still)_06

Hans Op de Beeck, still from Night Time, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY. © Hans Op de Beeck

Night Time  (still)_09

Hans Op de Beeck, still from Night Time, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY. © Hans Op de Beeck

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review.