Art = transformation = energy

In the years we still organized the Artists Nights, no audience but only artists came to talk about paint and turpentine, about how to read a text, reading texts and musicians trying out something new in their repertoire, etc… A young poet showed up one day late and a dollar short. Literally. He read to me in the kitchen while I made a ham and cheese sandwich platter and I was impressed by his search, his seriousness and his abundance. At the next occasion he read for the whole group very complicated (good) poems. My friend Rockcastle was present at that occasion and asked him to read in a different way until she understood the text. Undaunted he complied with her request and I must say that I learned from the hilarious experiment. So with joy in my heart I received an invitation to ‘Transform-Duality’ an exhibition/overview of his visual art of the last 10 years. He paints and does installations and transforms readymades into a new concept. Some of the conceptual objects are in aluminum in which he carves the words that make you think, sometimes a pencil drawing is added. Sometimes in the hanging of the separate elements you realize the message could be different. This way the linearity of language is questioned by the use of space and material. It is all about duality, present and future, war and peace, new and recycled. His oils on canvas seem to me to stay on the surface, even in the paintings with a lot of perspective, maybe referring to the superficiality of these times while examining our contemporary society with a critical mindset. Most human figures are painted in the nude, an iconic reference to old Greek art work. To me the humans seem distorted, while a Doctor admired their anatomical precision. So what do I know. His work is clean without being sleek or slick being too honest in his search for that. Art = transformation = energy. A suivre…