WAY gallery presents Long Distance Romance with Memories, a new body of work by Manon Steyaert, marking her second solo exhibition at the gallery.

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Steyaert works across painting and sculpture, manipulating materials such as silicone alongside more traditional mediums including oil paint, canvas and wood. Her work often explores colour in suspension, with silicone draped over painted canvas to create shifting, layered surfaces. More recently, Steyaert has been turning her attention back towards painting, reconnecting with the intuitive and gestural language of abstraction.

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Long Distance Romance with Memories is a new body of work that embraces the passage of time and the shifting nature of place. The exhibition reflects on Steyaert’s childhood and on physical spaces that have gradually changed, disappeared, or passed out of her life. She revisits these places through memory: gardens, woodland walks and explorations through the countryside of France. Returning to them in her mind, fragments of memories emerge, guided and translated through the movement of the paintbrush.

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At the centre of the exhibition is a large-scale work that brings together multiple spaces, sensations and fragments of recollection. Almost like a landscape constructed from memory, the work gathers disparate moments and feelings into a single space, capturing and rebuilding them through paint and material.

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Alongside this central piece, Steyaert presents a smaller series of works that shift the focus towards individual memories and fleeting moments. These intimate works draw the viewer towards smaller gestures, where scenes appear and begin to emerge through a haze of colour. Their scale evokes postcard sized printed photographs, playing with the idea of false memories and nostalgia, where remembering the image of a place begins to overpower the experience of having been there.

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In this new body of work, silicone becomes both a material and a veil. Semi-transparent, alternating between matte and glossy surface, it allows varying amounts of light to penetrate the paintings beneath. Steyaert carefully drapes the silicone into controlled folds, obscuring some areas of the painted surface while bringing others into focus. Where the silicone meets the canvas, the two layers become intertwined, creating a tension between the sculptural and the painted.

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This layered and playful visual language invites the viewer to question the boundaries

between painting and sculpture, while considering how memory itself is formed, altered and preserved. Through colour, gesture and translucent layers, Steyaert creates

spaces that feel both familiar and elusive, inviting us to experience memory through a playful coloured haze.