The Hidden History by Tom Poelmans Installation view
Poelmans climbs the trees of memory and never comes down—his paintings are fairy tales wrapped in allegory, suspended between illusion and truth.
Domenico de Chirico
Andrea Festa presents The Hidden History, the first solo exhibition in Italy Poelmans (b.1984), curated by Domenico de Chirico. In this exhibition, Poelmans navigates the delicate space between spontaneity and structure, fantasy and symbolism. Through dense, allegorical paintings rich with dreamlike imagery, Poelmans becomes a modern-day narrator of the subconscious—channeling fables, history, and personal mythology.
In this striking new body of work, Poelmans embraces a painting process that oscillates between freedom and control. Each canvas begins with a gesture of spontaneity—an intuitive act—but soon faces the illusion of free will, where subconscious imagery and symbolic complexity take over. The result is a vibrant, layered journey through internal landscapes, where dream logic, metaphors, and fantastical figures converge.
Poelmans’ painting language is rooted in duality: between material surface and imaginary depth, between fairy tale and philosophical reflection. Like a narrator in a timeless fable, he crafts scenes that evoke the surrealism of Calvino’s “The Cloven Viscount” or “The Nonexistent Knight,” placing his characters in absurd but emotionally resonant worlds. As de Chirico notes, *“Poelmans climbs the trees of his home garden and promises never to come down again”—*a metaphor for the artist's journey into interior mythology and the search for personal truth through pictorial invention.
His densely painted surfaces, full of confident brushwork and vibrant colors, are both tactile and cerebral. Each canvas is a narrative world unto itself, where myth, memory, and metaphor blend into an alternate visual history. These allegorical landscapes invite reflection on the tension between illusion and authenticity, between childhood imagination and adult introspection.