There are images we look at and forget, and images that cling to us like scars.

Images that refuse to be consumed and instead consume us, slowly, silently, until they carve an opening between who we think we are and who we truly are.

The works of Souls belong to this second category.

They do not present themselves as mere representations, but as apparitions: fragile, burning presences that ask not to be observed but to be inhabited, and perhaps even feared.

Skilux, a Belgian artist who has long explored the emotional dimension of digital imagery, has built with Souls a constellation of fifty unique black-and-white works: bodies and fragments suspended in void, as if surfacing from an interior space too deep to be named.

They are not portraits, not characters; they are what remains when identity collapses, when narrative is stripped away, when one is left alone with the raw core of being.

They are nameless figures yet laden with memory, figures holding their breath, bent by light, carved by shadow, figures that, though still, seem on the verge of breaking or being reborn.

What strikes us first is their stark essentiality: no color, no narrative context, no descriptive elements to anchor them to reality.

It is an aesthetic of subtraction, almost ascetic, depriving the eye of all distractions to force it to confront what it normally avoids.

Skilux has deliberately erased all excess, as if color itself were too loud to speak of what is fragile.

In this choice one hears echoes of a long lineage, the monochrome as emotional intensifier, from Malevich to minimalism, and the shadow as psychic territory, as in the contorted bodies of Bacon or the skeletal beings of Giacometti.

Souls dialogues with this tradition yet stands apart from it: here there is no explicit scream, no violence, only a dense, suspended silence, as heavy as a cry.

Silence is the true substance of these works.

Silence as what cannot be said, what we dare not confess.Silence as the archive of everything that has shaped us: shame, wounds, love, absence.

Souls is born from precisely there, from that part of ourselves that stays hidden beneath the smooth surfaces we show to the world.

We live by displaying curated fragments, readable versions of ourselves, but what defines us is what remains unseen, what stays in shadow.

Skilux delves into this blind and invisible zone, and attempts to give it form.

Each work becomes a threshold: a passage between interiority and the outside world, between flesh and memory, between who we are and who we fear we might be.

To look at these works is to accept being looked at.

Because Souls does not merely catch the gaze: it holds it, returns it, reflects it back like an opaque mirror.

The viewer does not remain outside, but is implicated, drawn inward.

This is why Skilux says you do not choose a Soul, the Soul chooses you.

Because encountering these images is not an act of rational selection, but of sudden and profound recognition.

It is an ancient, almost archetypal psychic mechanism: what strikes us most deeply is always what already belongs to us, even if we do not know it.

In this sense, collecting a Soul does not mean owning an object, but entering into a pact with a part of oneself.

A silent, intimate, and enduring pact.

Those who carry one of these works accept that it will continue to watch them over time, like a mute conscience that remembers what they would rather forget, and that, for this very reason, belongs to them more than anything else.

It is no surprise, then, that these images offer no comfort, no catharsis: they are not meant to heal, but to remind.

They are wounds left open so that we do not stop feeling.

In an era that consumes millions of images each day, where seeing has become automatic, superficial, Souls stands as an act of poetic resistance.

Against speed, it offers slowness.

Against abundance, subtraction.

Against narrative, silence.

It does not seek to capture attention but to suspend it, forcing us to pause, to breathe, to remain before something we cannot simply scroll past.

And it is in this remaining that transformation happens: not in spectacle, but in contemplation.

Not in possession, but in surrender.

Skilux reminds us that art does not exist to show us what we already know, but what we are afraid to know.

That the truest images are not those that reassure us, but those that fracture us.

And that sometimes, to find ourselves again, we must allow ourselves to be chosen by a soul.