Parloir Brussels 2026 with Final Hot Desert

Rik Moens

Matthew Peers

Rechonski

Rue d’Arlon 104, 1040

Brussels, Belgium

22nd - 26th April 2026

Untitled (Nachdruk), 2026

Dry transfer decal

5 x 6 mm

Open Edition

A dry transfer decal reproduction of an ornamental fleuron from Trattner’s Abdruck von denjenigen Röslein, etc., Vienna (1760).

The specimen of Johann Thomas Trattner of Vienna may properly come under German specimen-books of this period. Its various parts devoted to roman, German, and exotic types and ornaments were published in 1759 and 1760.… To German text types some ornamented letters add a touch of horror hitherto unachieved by any Teutonic type-cutter; but the entire vulgarity of the fraktur displayed is relieved by some very good schwabacher fonts.…We reproduce…a page of these vignettes de fonte.

• Daniel Berkeley Updike (Printing Types, 1922)

Nachdruck refers to the copying of a printed book and publishing it without authorisation by the author or the original publisher. I translate Nachdruck, literally ‘reprint’, with unauthorised print to emphasise the blurry legal situation that rendered this practice not yet comprehensively illegal or criminal. By the mid-eighteenth century the validity of imperial privileges was superseded by individual state privileges. This meant books were only secure from Nachdruck within the borders of the state that had granted a privilege. Regionally fluctuating publishing rights resulted in Nachdruck becoming one of the constitutive factors in the professional development of publishers between the first booksellers’ society in Leipzig in 1765 and the German- wide prohibition of Nachdruck in 1835.

• Isabelle Riepe (Negotiating practice and identity through Nachdruck, 2025)

Nocturnal, 2026

Music score, dowel, tape.

A wooden dowel placed in the space and wrapped in a published score for “Nocturnal” by Edgard Varès who identified “sound as living matter”. Transmission device to charge particles in the air. A mirror is inserted at either end of the dowel reflecting and extending the notation indefinitely.

Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same. We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds. Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of air comes, tumble down upon him.

• Charles Dickens (The Uncommercial Traveller, 1860)

The pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Strong and audible as they may be in the immediate neighbourhood of the speaker, and at the immediate moment of utterance, their quickly attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears. The motions they have impressed on the particles of one portion of our atmosphere, are communicated to constantly increasing numbers, but the total quantity of motion measured in the same direction receives no addition.

• Charles Babbage (The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 1838)