Words by Wendela Rang

Some paintings you look at. Others, you can almost hear. With its new exhibition A Red that Sings – on show until 30 August – the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp is asking visitors to do exactly that: listen. 

A Red that Sings brings together the “Big Three” Belgian colourists James Ensor, Rik Wouters, and Jules Schmalzigaug – painters who at the turn of the twentieth century broke from the soft tones of Impressionism and pushed colour into starker territories, seeking to mirror or evoke the qualities of sound in their work.

66 works by 10 artists are presented in dialogue across four rooms, centered around the vivid paintings of Ensor, Wouters, and Schmalzigaug. Debussy’s Arabesque plays softly throughout – a nod to the arabesque form’s rhythmic patterns, and a calm contrast to the paintings’ violent reds, deep blues, and bright yellows.

The exhibition title comes from Schmalzigaug himself, who heard something in Peter Paul Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi (1624-1625). Schmalzigaug described it as a singing red – a thread curator Adriaan Gonnissen wanted to pick up on. For Gonnissen, that red is about more than pigment. It is the rhythm hidden in the structure of Rubens’ garments, the way colour gives them movement, almost sound. Rubens “was the Quentin Tarantino of his age,” Gonnissen says – and it is precisely that visceral, chromatic energy that Ensor, Wouters, and Schmalzigaug embodied and reinterpreted, each in their own way.

A Red that Sings invites us to a multisensory way of looking – and listening. Go and see for yourself if you can hear it.

A Red That Sings, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, 11 April – 30 August 2026.