Milan JESPERS, Marcello NITTI Newton's Sleep

The Huberty & Breyne’s Bruxelles | Châtelain gallery is hosting a dual exhibition, Newton’s Sleep, featuring the work of Milan Jespers (BE) and Marcello Nitti (IT). The exhibition is due to run from Friday 6 November to Saturday 12 December 2026. The project – whose title is drawn from a poem by William Blake – takes as its starting point the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, an event synonymous with major climatic upheavals and the trigger for what became known as the “Year Without a Summer”. Through this historical lens, the two artists explore our transition from a world that could be described as “magical” to the age of industrial and scientific advances. They examine the contemporary “sleep of reason” in which the purely mathematical measurement of reality seems to have eclipsed imagination and emotion.
The centrepiece of the exhibition – around which everything else is organised – is Milan Jespers’ monumental Tambora installation, a true-to-scale reproduction of a funerary moment incorporating 200 portraits of key 19th-century figures linked to the concept of the “disenchantment of the world”. Marcello  Nitti mirrors the form of this work on a reduced scale, locating it within a painted landscape where trees and the natural world assume their rightful place. Alongside these two artworks, paintings, drawings and watercolours by both artists “converse” with one another in a continuous process of pictorial exchange. The result is a textured universe where clouds emerge as the exhibition’s key motif – the delicate crossover point between rigorous scientific observation and pure Romantic transcendence.

Newton’s Sleep offers a subtle critique of our technological  hyperactivity. Confronting modern-day functional rationality, the exhibition mirrors our current imaginative paralysis – the profound inability of our societies to conceive alternatives to the dominant economic system. It is a powerful visual invitation to awaken our potential for contemplation. 

The origins of Newton’s Sleep 

The title of the exhibition is drawn from a poem William Blake included in a letter to his patron Thomas Butts on 22 November 1802. The poem challenges the notion that scientific and mathematical reason alone can fully encompass the experience of reality.
Blake’s “four-fold vision” allows us to perceive reality as it exists beyond mere physical appearances. Material perception – which reduces the universe to measurable data, atoms and mathematical laws – must be accompanied, as he sees it, by emotional and imaginative dimensions capable of completing our understanding of the world.

Blake’s critique of the mechanistic reduction of experience resonates with particular force today in the context of contemporary thinking on technological capitalism and neoliberal rationality. By replacing the industrial machine of the 19th century with today’s algorithms and economic efficiency, our contemporary "single vision" reduces the human being to a consumer, a statistical data point, a productive resource.

The mathematical measurement of the world has become the algorithmic quantification of our lives. Where Newton saw only mechanical formulas, contemporary digital technocracy sees only metrics, clicks and profit, stripping existence of its spiritual and inner dimensions.
As the cultural theorist and philosopher Mark Fisher argues, we now inhabit a state of imaginative paralysis in which “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. This perfectly echoes the notion of “sleep” to which Blake refers: it is a torpor of the soul, a condition of passive acceptance. Such sleep does not equate with ignorance but rather with the inability to imagine other possibilities – a “Black Iron Prison” (a concept invented by American writer Phillip K. Dick) that constricts the human mind.

The moment the world began to fall asleep 

Thirteen years after William Blake wrote that letter to Thomas Butts, the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history occurred. The eruption of Mount Tambora, located on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, reached its devastating climax on 10 April 1815. The immense quantity of volcanic ash spewed into the atmosphere caused global temperatures to drop, giving rise to what became known as the “Year Without a Summer”. Many popular and theological interpretations linked this absence of light and springtime to the end of the world and the death of the sun.
Although the link to the Indonesian eruption was not established in Europe until a century later, this event contributed to a process that had begun some decades earlier: the systematic scientific study of natural phenomena, which gradually and simultaneously stripped them of their symbolic significance. New scientific disciplines – including climatology and volcanology – emerged, and innovations in agriculture and public health were also developed to address the consequences of this catastrophe.
In many respects, the eruption of Tambora marks the transition from a magical-religious worldview to a scientific and rational understanding of nature, accelerating processes already set in motion by the Scientific Revolution and the First Industrial Revolution, and contributing to the foundations of modern society.
This historical event provides the starting point for the exhibition. Chosen by the artists for its symbolic significance, it signifies the moment the world began to “fall asleep”.

Tambora, 200 faces of a century in transformation 

Milan Jespers’ central work takes its title from the mountain that darkened the skies in 1816. This monumental installation reproduces, on a one-to-one scale, a funerary monument from the Monumental Cemetery of Lecce, replacing the original commemorative portraits with 200 new ones created over a three-year period. Depicting key figures of the 19th century, these portraits all revolve around the Weberian concept of the "disenchantment of the world”. Reproducing these portraits was an extraordinary task, but equally remarkable is the meticulous process of archival research, annotation and historical study that preceded their creation.

The monument reappears, on a smaller scale, in a work by Marcello Nitti, who covers its entire surface with a painted landscape. As if reflected in a mirror, the natural environment envelops the architectural structure and, in accordance with the cycle of life itself, bodies now appear in the form of trees.

The livid atmosphere is a vivid evocation of volcanic disturbances, the sky’s red and yellow  hues reminiscent of certain famous landscapes by Turner, many of them painted in the aftermath of the 1815 eruption and bearing witness to the persistent atmospheric conditions triggered by that event.
These two works form the core around which the entire exhibition is organised via a series of two-dimensional pieces – watercolours, paintings and preparatory sketches – that reflect a process of constant exchange between the two artists. Certain subjects are explored independently by both artists, while others are the exclusive focus of one or the other. The  sense of continuity lies not only in the shared themes but also in a shared dedication to technical mastery – watercolour in Jespers’ case, oil painting in Nitti’s – and in a sustained engagement with the language of classical aesthetics.

From Vanitas to animal laborans 

The presence of death – while recalling the catastrophic consequences of the Tambora eruption (estimated to have claimed, directly or indirectly, over 300,000 lives) – also recalls the classical Vanitas tradition. The fragility of human existence challenges the concept of humanity as animal laborans, trapped in an endless cycle of production and consumption – a form of hollow, self-imposed hyperactivity that ultimately represents the “deep sleep” of humanity’s infinite contemplative potential, sacrificed on the altar of economic performance.

The sky as a space for observation and contemplation

Numerous cloud studies created by our two artists also echo the work of the Romantics. "The sky is the source of light in nature – and governs everything", observed John Constable (writing from a purely scientific perspective) while continuing to regard it as "the chief organ of sentiment".

There is a long and rich tradition of cloud as symbol. Clouds represent a transcendent realm, the abode of the gods, an image of the infinite and the threshold between earthly reality and the divine.

Clouds that drift, collide, merge, dissolve…
Clouds of vapour.
Clouds of ash.


Reconciling reason and imagination 

Newton’s Sleep does not turn its back on scientific knowledge. Instead, it proposes a reconciliation of those elements that the modern world has progressively hived off from one another – reason and imagination, measurement and contemplation, history and nature, the individual and the environment.

The works of Milan Jespers and Marcello Nitti inhabit this interface, transforming monument, portrait and landscape into instruments for examining the present without forsaking the complexity of the past.

OPENING 
Thursday 5 November 2026 
from 6.00 pm 
in the presence of the artists 

EXHIBITION
From Friday 6 November 
to Saturday 12 December 2026 

BRUXELLES | Châtelain
33 place du Châtelain
1050 Bruxelles
Wednesday > Saturday 11.00 am – 6.00 pm