In both Juanan Soria's pencil drawings and Kevin Vanwonterghem's charcoal drawings, light takes centre stage through a contrast between the white and the deep black on paper. During their conversations, fascinating ideas and reflections emerged on myths and rationality, on Romanticism and Enlightenment, on magic and disenchantment, on mysticism and science. This dialectic through opposites brought interesting perspectives on the layers of meaning of the phenomenon of light.

In recent years, Spanish artist Juanan Soria got fascinated by archaeology in Spain and focuses on the topic of Iberian artefacts of the Protohistory period. The archaeological methodology and initially his own artistic practice as a painter, inspired him to do research on the signification of 'layers' in the broadest sense of the word. By establishing an interesting dialogue between material culture and digital imaging in his ‘Artifact’ series, Juanan Soria created multi-layered drawings that reveal a multitude of interpretations. In Juanan Soria’s new ‘Noctiluca’ series light takes centre stage through the goddess called ‘Noctiluca’ – she who gives light in the darkness. His black and white pencil drawings are inspired by mythology, ancient rituals and the pre-modern worldview on natural phenomena. Kevin Vanwonterghem's drawings evoke an imaginary world in which landscape elements form the building blocks for fictional, sometimes surreal settings. Each landscape lacks human presence and goes beyond the pure representation of a setting. His current sources of inspiration are the relationship between culture and nature, along with religion and science. Triggered by what lies in the twilight zone between the mystical and explicable, Kevin Vanwonterghem explores how humans still need magic and wonder in postmodern times of demythologisation. Because of his preference to draw with charcoal, Vanwonterghem’s visual universe is defined by strong light-dark contrasts and nuances. During his creative process much attention is paid to the viewing experience. The use of very dark pressed charcoal on paper allows him to obtain very deep black tones. His velvety executed landscapes immerse the beholder into a dark mysterious atmosphere, somewhere between reality and fiction, between objectification and romanticism. The concept of the image and the aesthetic experience are equally important.