Jan Boex

Jan Boex (b. 1993, Halle, Belgium) is a visual artist working primarily in charcoal, pastel and coloured pencil. He studied drawing at the Kunstacademie Halle.

Boex works from photographs he takes in places he passes regularly. Where others walk on, he stops: at sunlight falling on a library window, a garden seen from a dark room, light seeping beneath a curtain. Moments that seem ordinary can suddenly appear unreal, and he keeps looking.

His drawings centre on the meeting of a natural world that has existed for billions of years and human additions that nature never needed: light from a distant sun on a windowsill, a number painted on a tree, a boundary stone in the middle of a forest.

In his ongoing project The Observed Limit, begun in 2025, evening scenes and dim interiors are subtly altered: a light appears without a clear source; the sky takes the place of a wall or a screen. Drawing on Kant’s concept of the noumenon, the world as it exists independently of human perception, Boex approaches looking as if the human senses could be set aside, and asks what remains of something once it loses its name.

His series This Vain Journey (2026) consists of five small drawings based on photographs of familiar places and moments he can barely remember. The images can be revisited; the moments themselves cannot be fully recovered.

In 2026 he presented a solo exhibition at Atelier Foyer, CC ’t Vondel in Halle. His work has also been shown in a duo exhibition at In Between Art in Bruges (2022), and in group exhibitions at Green Door Gallery in Brussels and The Eat of Arting by Artroom in Ghent (2025).