Michèle Schoonjans gallery
ArtContest and the Michèle Schoonjans Gallery are delighted to invite you to discover the installation “Red Planet Vol.3”, created by Belgian artist Xavier Duffaut, the 2024 winner. An active member of ArtContest since 2007, Michèle Schoonjans is making her gallery available as a showcase for ArtContest during the summer of 2026. With ‘RED Planet Experience Vol. 3’, the artist transports us into an immersive experience at the heart of a reimagined Mars: a post-apocalyptic landscape where the dream of space exploration clashes with the reality of contemporary consumerism. Through a series of works blending religious iconography, advertising aesthetics and the entertainment industry, the installation questions the commodification of utopia and corporate control over our collective imaginations....
ArtContest and the Michèle Schoonjans Gallery are delighted to invite you to discover the installation “Red Planet Vol.3”, created by Belgian artist Xavier Duffaut, the 2024 winner. An active member of ArtContest since 2007, Michèle Schoonjans is making her gallery available as a showcase for ArtContest during the summer of 2026. With ‘RED Planet Experience Vol. 3’, the artist transports us into an immersive experience at the heart of a reimagined Mars: a post-apocalyptic landscape where the dream of space exploration clashes with the reality of contemporary consumerism. Through a series of works blending religious iconography, advertising aesthetics and the entertainment industry, the installation questions the commodification of utopia and corporate control over our collective imaginations. The project is based on a radical decontextualisation: everyday urban objects — scooters, smart bins, electric vehicle charging points — are transplanted onto the Martian landscape. These artefacts of the ‘smart city’ appear here as totems of our hyper-modernity, embodying a race for technological innovation, where planned obsolescence and the volatility of private services dictate the evolution of our visual landscape. By redesigning these industrial objects, often unloved or vandalised, the artist attempts to immortalise them. With humour, he transforms urban mobility infrastructure and waste into precious relics, elevating the temporary to create a monument to memory. This monumental dimension takes on a sacred quality, for example in the work *Push me down* (2025), where the connected bin stands like a monolith, an object of worship or a funerary monument. Further on, the composition of e-Trinity (2024–2026) subverts Christian iconography: a Tesla charging station, flanked by two scooters, evokes the structure of a triptych altarpiece, in which astroculture and new technologies appear to us as new forms of religious belief. Finally, the exhibition grounds its narrative in raw social reality. The presence on the floor of nitrous oxide canisters — waste collected from public spaces — adds a touch of tragicomic mystery. Between the anti-heroic connotations of deflated balloons and the symbolic violence of exclusion, the work casts a disenchanted gaze upon the city. “RED Planet Experience” thus reveals the gulf between the high-tech smoothing of our functionalist environments and the misery they seek to conceal. A vision that is both amusing and nightmarish, where the future bears a strange resemblance to a present we no longer wish to see.” About the artist Xavier Duffaut’s practice encompasses installations, sculptures and performances that draw as much from the conventions of exhibition-making as from those of theatrical staging. His work employs hybrid formats—objects, environments, situations and performative devices—which enable him to explore various interpretative frameworks spanning fiction, social critique and popular culture. His projects often take the form of offbeat, absurd, disillusioned and sometimes unsettling narratives. Through these scenarios, he explores collective imaginations linked to consumerism, contemporary technologies and media narratives. Alongside his installations, Xavier Duffaut develops a series of performances and conceptual projects that extend this logic of subversion. Drawing equally on the codes of marketing, sport, entertainment and event management, these works blur the boundaries between artistic experience and mass culture. Projects such as Daddy Issues, Stranger Things at the Art Fair, Délivrénoo Fitness Club and Black Friday demonstrate this desire to transform contemporary mechanisms of seduction into grounds for critical fiction. Throughout his practice, Xavier Duffaut explores how contemporary systems of representation shape our behaviour and our imaginations, creating works that are critical, ambiguous and deliberately alluring.Opening Hours
| Monday | 11:00 - 18:00 |
| Tuesday | 11:00 - 18:00 |
| Wednesday | 11:00 - 18:00 |
| Thursday | 11:00 - 18:00 |
| Friday | 11:00 - 18:00 |
| Saturday | 11:00 - 18:00 |
| Sunday | Closed |
| ... and by appointment | |