When a Painting Becomes a Room - Experiencing Van Gogh’s Starry Night at Fabrique des Lumières, Amsterdam

Immersed in Van Gogh at Fabrique des Lumières in Amsterdam - the whole room turns into Starry Night and people become tiny silhouettes inside his restless, glowing sky.

In the cavernous hall of Fabrique des Lumières, the darkness does not simply recede - it opens. What was once an industrial gasworks on Amsterdam’s Westergasterrein becomes, for a moment, a chapel of colour and motion: concrete walls dissolve into swirling cobalt, the floor turns liquid with brushstrokes and the night sky that Vincent van Gogh once painted within the tight borders of a canvas suddenly spills into every direction at once.

Here, Starry Night is no longer an object encountered at a respectful distance. It is an atmosphere.

From gasworks to galaxy

Fabrique des Lumières is already a palimpsest before a single pixel lights up. The brick shell of the nineteenth-century gas factory, with its high vaults and iron skeleton, carries the memory of smoke, labour and the measured rhythm of industrial time. Now, more than a hundred projectors lace that same space with light, transforming it into the largest immersive digital art centre in the Netherlands.

When Van Gogh’s sky appears, it does not arrive quietly. It climbs the walls, folds around corners, surges across the ceiling. The familiar cypress tree stretches like a dark flame above our heads; the village, usually compressed at the bottom of the painting, now wraps around us in fragments. People stand, walk, sit on the floor. Some lean against the walls, as if they might feel the paint under their palms. Others simply lie down, letting the blue and gold wash over their faces.

The hall no longer functions as a room. It feels like being inside a thought.

A painting unframed

Van Gogh’s original Starry Night (1889) hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York - a single, finite object, painted during his time in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, its surface only as large as the stretcher behind it.

In another city, another canvas - Starry Night Over the Rhône - is kept at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, anchoring a different night sky to a different river.

Yet in Amsterdam, in this former gas hall, both of these worlds seem to loosen their geographic roots. The immersive show weaves Van Gogh among Dutch masters of the seventeenth century; we move in seconds from stormy seas and candlelit interiors to a romantic night under his starry sky.

The painting is no longer tied to the quiet authority of a museum wall. It becomes an event - something that happens to us, around us, with us.

This unframing is unsettling and liberating at once. Part of us longs for the smallness of the original canvas, for the intimacy of standing before a painting that still carries the exact gestures of the artist’s hand. Yet another part delights in this new scale, where a single brushstroke - magnified across meters of wall - reveals its own turbulence, its own secret architecture of colour.

Walking inside a mind

To be surrounded by Starry Night is to feel the painting’s restlessness migrate into the body. Van Gogh’s sky has always been in motion: spirals pushing against one another, stars burning with almost feverish intensity, the moon swollen and watchful. In the immersive hall, that movement becomes literal. The projections glide, swell, dissolve; the stars pulse; the paint seems to breathe.

We, too, start to move differently. We slow down, not out of obligation, but because the space itself has shifted tempo. Children trace the swirling lines with their arms; adults tilt their heads back, searching for some fixed point in the ceiling’s shifting vortex. The usual museum choreography - the step forward, the step back, the quick photo, the polite retreat - is replaced by a kind of drifting.

It is easy, in such a setting, to speak of spectacle and to worry about distraction. Phones rise in the air, capturing the moment; the night sky appears on a second set of screens. But even as we record, something more intimate is happening: we experience the painting not as an image to be decoded, but as a climate to be endured.

For a few minutes, the border between our inner weather and Van Gogh’s sky grows thin.

Between reverence and reinvention

There is a tension at the heart of experiences like this. On one side stands the museum, with its insistence on authenticity: the original canvas, the controlled light, the quiet distance that protects both work and viewer. On the other side stands the digital hall, flooded with sound and colour, inviting us to sit on the floor, to talk, to look up instead of forward.

Fabrique des Lumières does not pretend to replace the original paintings. Instead, it stretches them - across architecture, across time, across the bodies of those who wander through. It shows us what happens when a work of art escapes its frame and enters a new kind of public life.

In that sense, the exhibition is not only about Van Gogh. It is also about us: about how contemporary viewers approach art through screens and projections, how we seek experiences that are both communal and deeply personal, how we carry images from one city to another, building our own mental museum across continents.

Starry Night becomes a meeting point between New York, Paris and Amsterdam, between the solitude of Van Gogh’s asylum room and the shared wonder of a crowd standing in a dark hall, bathed in blue.

A new kind of night sky

As the sequence moves on - back to other paintings, other centuries - the stars slowly fade from the walls. The floor returns to grey. People blink, adjust their eyes, stand up and gather their coats. Outside, the real Amsterdam night waits: tram lines, bicycle bells, reflections on the canal.

And yet, something of that digital sky seems to linger. The memory of it is oddly physical - not just an image, but a sensation of colour on the skin, of movement in the corner of the eye. For a brief time, we inhabited Van Gogh’s turbulence from the inside; we let his question about how to paint a night full of feeling become a question about how we, today, might still look at the stars.

In the end, Fabrique des Lumières is more than a spectacle of light. It is a contemporary experiment in remembrance: a way of re-telling the story of a painting by letting it pass through another architecture, another technology, another generation of viewers.

The former gasworks, once a machine for turning darkness into light, now hosts a different alchemy. Within its brick walls, Van Gogh’s anxious, luminous sky is unbound from its frame and offered back to us as an environment - not to possess, but to pass through.

For a moment, under that swirling blue, we are all simply small figures inside a vast, restless night.