Heavy Metal, Soft Touch: Paul Cocksedge’s Dance with Steel and Stone

Walk into Paul Cocksedge’s Critical Mass exhibition in Brussels, and you are instantly confronted by paradox. A table made from a CorTen steel plate — fifteen millimetres thick, weighing hundreds of kilos — hovers with improbable lightness. Marble blocks, ancient and immovable, lean into one another as if sharing an embrace. Brutality becomes tenderness. Mass becomes intimacy.

This tension is the essence of Cocksedge’s work. Known for pushing materials into unfamiliar narratives, the British artist-designer takes what feels unyielding — steel, marble — and coaxes out something almost sensual. His tables look on the verge of collapse, yet stand firm. His stone pieces compress and nestle like lovers. What could be cold, industrial, or distant instead feels human, fragile, present.

It’s no coincidence that Critical Mass emerged against a backdrop of seismic change. Cocksedge has spoken about how the work evolved alongside his reflections on two defining forces of our age: artificial intelligence and climate change. The exhibition becomes a meditation on pressure points — the way society, technology, and the environment are all converging, accelerating, demanding release. Steel cut, welded, lifted. Marble stacked, leaned, compressed. Everything in balance, but just barely.

And yet, despite this conceptual weight, the work is grounded in something refreshingly physical. Cocksedge describes the factory atmosphere — the sparks of welding, the heat of steel, the immediacy of touch — as an antidote to the digital abstractions that dominate our lives.

So much of life today feels filtered through screens and algorithms; there’s a raw honesty in watching matter resist and transform. Cocksedge’s tables and sculptures remind us that strength and softness are not opposites but complements — objects that teach us as much about yielding as they do about enduring.

Brussels feels like the right stage for this dialogue. A city of contradictions — bureaucratic yet bohemian, stately yet subversive — it offers a backdrop where Cocksedge’s work doesn’t just sit, but converses with its surroundings. From the heavy marble facades of Sablon to the steel arteries of the city’s industry, the show resonates with the urban fabric.

At its core, Critical Mass seduces because it straddles worlds: digital anxiety and material presence, collapse and resilience, sharpness and embrace. It is a reminder that in an age of acceleration, beauty often lies in the pause — in the friction between extremes, in the balance before the break.

Paul Cocksedge – Critical Mass

Objects with Narratives
Place du Grand Sablon 40, 1000 Brussels
Until 16 November