by Jeffrey Grunthaner // Feb. 24, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Wellness.
Béla Pablo Janssen’s ‘Theater der Sonnenzuwendung’ is, on just about every level, an invitation—not only to see, but to inhabit. Filling out both floors as well as the stairwells of the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Janssen’s constellation of assemblages, drawings, installations, détourned posters, mixed-media and sound works welcomes attentive exploration. They offer an overarching pattern and meaning, centered on cosmological dimensions of experience rarely expressed in art. Framed as a gesamtkunstwerk, the exhibition’s communal trajectory underscores a fundamental question of well-being: can art meaningfully recalibrate how we feel in time and among others, or does it merely stage the appearance of such a reorientation?
Béla Pablo Janssen: ‘Toilette & Observatorium (Theater der Sonnenzuwendung),’ 2026; atelier (Theater der Sonnenzuwendung), 2026 // Courtesy of the artist
As its title indicates, the exhibition is organized around the theme of the sun, which Janssen mobilizes to activate a host of overlapping associations: astrological, energetic, astronomical, vitalistic. The melding of sun, sociability and the repurposing of the old is integral to his concept of planetary workings. The archival aspect of his work often involves reworking found objects, artifacts, even discarded artworks, expressing the cyclical nature of cosmic phenomena. Unlike artists who revisit earlier works for formal refinement, however, Janssen’s modifications serve less pictorial ends than holistic ones. Individual works operate as supports for novel ways of deciphering the world—engaging modes of behavior that are experiential rather than strictly conceptual.
Béla Pablo Janssen: ‘Auswahl ANARCHIVE (fig. 104–145),’ 2023-2026 // Courtesy of the artist
The invitation is to see things against a cosmological backdrop. Materials take on renewed connotations; posters are rendered all but illegible; what’s borrowed becomes new; totalizing gestures are effaced. This is more scientific than it might at first sound. Something about the precision of science—the way it is ongoing but still new, and the fact that we’re sitting in the midst of of it—positions contemporary astronomical knowledge as a new mode of awareness. Planets are no longer mythic figures but foreign terrains. If earlier cosmologies readily lent themselves to allegory, ours demands a different approach. Janssen responds by realizing an exhibition which, like an ecosystem, can sustain novel forms of life. The cosmos here is not decorative but structural—less a symbol than an environing condition.
Béla Pablo Janssen: ‘#167, Berlin,’ November 2023 / ‘#167, Langenargen,’ Oktober 2023; ‘#AA / #AA; #099, Köln Blankenheim,’ März 2012 / ‘#168, Neptunes,’ April 2024; ‘#085, Le Béal,’ Juli 2010 / ‘#AA; #109, Paris,’ Dezember 2013 / ‘#180, Paris-Montparnasse,’ Oktober 2025; ‘#AA / #AA; #150, Madrid,’ Februar 2022 / ‘#163a, Neptunes,’ März 2023; ‘#170, Berlin,’ August, 2024 / ‘#AA’ // Courtesy of the artist and Alber Collection
‘Theater der Sonnenzuwendung’ does not declare that “all is well with the universe,” or pretend to anything permanent in an architectural sense. Instead, it adopts the rhythm of a travelog. Just as planets journey around the sun, composed of matter in differing states, the works on the gallery’s second floor—particularly a suite of framed drawings in pencil—unpack like an elliptical journal. The earliest drawing on view dates from 2010 in Köln, and the most recent was made in 2024 in Berlin. Between these dates are drawings that document time spent in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Madrid and elsewhere. Taken altogether, they trace out memory not as a continual arc but as a dispersion—something closer to celestial mapping than autobiography. Kitty-corner to where the series tapers off, the neon sculpture ‘morgens endet nie’ (2026) glows like a bar sign or solar flare, a suggestive reminder of the final glory of our exploratory thirst.
Béla Pablo Janssen: ‘morgens endet nie,’ neon, 2026 // Courtesy of the artist and Alber Collection
In this same room, the wall of linked canvases to your right schematically delineates nude figures and other imaginal shapes. Crepuscular in tone, poised in the interzone between nebulae and retinal afterimages, these works intimate the phenomenology of inner experience—not as something fragmented or dissolving, but as a subtle web of sensations unloosed from the modular staccato imposed by linear time. This area of the exhibition suggests that well-being may consist less in resolving fragmentation than in recognizing ourselves as already patterned within larger, cyclical rhythms. In this regard, the cosmic patterns alluded to throughout Janssen’s gesamtkunstwerk are less mystical than restorative—in intention and, more importantly, in effect. What the exhibition tests is whether restoration can be lived and felt rather than merely represented.
Béla Pablo Janssen: ’24H IS ROUND,’ 2018; ‘CACAO MARAVILHIÃO,’ 2016; ‘VOYAGE DE TOILE,’ 2016; ‘Ohne Titel (Anonymous & Anarchive fig. 61),’ 2021; ‘365 IS ROUND,’ 2018; ‘Ohne Titel (Galaxy Sex),’ 2022; ‘Ohne Titel (Anonymous & Anarchive fig. 4),’ 2022–2023; ‘Für Mamuschka,’ 2017 // Courtesy of the artist
This becomes most explicit in the exhibition’s participatory elements. A mobile, fully-operational sauna served as a focal point on opening night and felt like a natural extension of the different goings-on (both scheduled and unscheduled) happening throughout the evening. Among these were live broadcasts from Pilot Radio (to which I contributed live music), two art critics offering roaming commentary and Janssen’s own walk-through, which transformed spectatorship into something closer to shared inhabitation. These gestures didn’t instrumentalize participation for spectacle, but seemed to ask whether communal gathering could recalibrate perception itself.
Here the distinction between therapeutic and instrumental well-being becomes essential. The jubilee of a good party is always beneficial for the mind; but ‘Theater der Sonnenzuwendung’ doesn’t lean on theatricality. The works assembled, the events programmed, even the favorable weather seemed wholly consonant with the cosmological themes structuring the exhibition, which absorbed all contingencies—conversations, coincidences—into a larger pattern. Participation felt neither coerced nor purely decorative. Music became a medium through which one could feel newly oriented, present and receptive.
Béla Pablo Janssen: ‘Ofen: HERMES, Keine Zeit Für Eile,’ 2026; ‘Schlaf und Lebensraum (Theater der Sonnenzuwendung),’ 2026; ‘Toilette & Observatorium (Theater der Sonnenzuwendung),’ 2026 // Courtesy of the artist
Flouting the binary of spectatorship versus participation—where the former merely watches and the latter is sucked in willy-nilly—Janssen proposes a third path: an exhibition that advances a cosmological mode of encounter. Questions of aesthetics almost fall by the wayside; aesthetic judgment—delight, provocation—becomes secondary to a subtler recalibration of attention. What matters isn’t whether an individual work succeeds formally, but what it suggests about cosmic time and planetary geography, and how fully it enables the exhibition as a whole to institute a renewed experience of time and relatedness.
If wellness is to mean more than lifestyle branding or symbolic reassurance, it must involve precisely this shift in orientation. ‘Theater der Sonnenzuwendung’ demonstrates that art can offer such an experience. It does more than signal well-being through representations; it creates experiential constellations of makeshift objects and evental happenings that become supports for additional meanings when, mutatis mutandis, the occasion arises. Not as much politically but cosmologically, art can still hold space for liminal experiences that eschew both the “secular” and “religious” domain. In a world predisposed to rupture, quartered by austerity and constraint, a turn towards planetary cycles, shared presence and dispersed memory offers not an escape so much as a needful attunement to the physis of cosmic rhythms. We’re the energetic expressions of these cycles, even if we no longer personify them. The body suffices.
Exhibition Info
Neuer Aachener Kunstverein
Béla Pablo Janssen: ‘Theater der Sonnenzuwendung’
Exhibition: Feb. 1-Apr. 12, 2026
neueraachenerkunstverein.de
Passstraße 29, 52070 Aachen, click here for map
