The present work is an intimately scaled painting from a body of work created in the early 2000s that shows porcelain figurines associated with religious devotion. Holy Child pictures one of these statuettes in close-up, its smooth, shiny face rendered in loose brushstrokes of chalky white, gray, and beige. As a painter, draughtsman, sculptor, and filmmaker, Borremans has employed cinematic gestures such as mise en scène or the close-up to emphasize certain features while downplaying others, which contribute to psychological tensions that shift expected readings of the work. Borremans tends not to produce them in total but to paint a fragment. In this way, the artist avoids the accusation of kitsch while admitting admiration for the ornament, the glint of light on the glaze, and the delicacy of the modeling.

The lack of specific context in the work provides a neutral, yet intensely charged atmosphere. Like archetypes capable of embodying shifting meanings, the portrayed visage becomes a mold for the human condition, at once satirical, tragic, humorous, and above all, contradictory. His work appears to explore complicated psychological states, yet these manifestations confuse simple logic. Intentionally deploying inexplicable signifiers colliding in ambiguous spaces of unsettling beauty, Borremans fulfills a wish 'to create an atmosphere outside time, a space where time has been canceled.'"