News/Termine - Künstler - Bart Vandevijvere
WANDERING IN BETWEEN
The pleasure of painting in a walking network full of junctions
I immediately found it an exceptionally fine title.
Unlike those oeuvres where the works are classified only by numbers or are an ensemble of ‘untitled’ paintings, in Bart Vandevijvere’s work the titles receive particular attention.
They quite frequently refer to music, such as ‘Cubes for Joachim Kühn’ and ‘Lines for Joëlle Léandre’. Sometimes they appear to refer to a world or the world: ‘The Collapse of Symbiosis’ and ‘Embracing the Circumstances’. They always leave sufficient room for the viewer.
The painting
The title ‘Wandering in Between’ offers lots of room.
Walking means doing, wandering, parading, strolling, running. Walking is active and physical. Walking holds the promise of a certain slowness. While walking you can look, think or philosophise.
‘In between’ refers to extremes between which you make your way. A domain arises between intuition and insight, proximity and distance, fullness and emptiness, despair and faith, density and insubstantiality.
The painting entitled ‘Wandering in Between’ (2017) is a large canvas of 130 by 160 cm, painted in acrylic paint and water, with music as its raw material. How does one compose with paint, colour and form? Let’s take a walk around in the painting. You walk from a sparing use of paint to greater density in a red triangle, from geometric forms to purely organic patterns, from controlled lines to spontaneous patches of paint. You suspect the presence of several superimposed layers and you see the whiteness of the prepared canvas.
The triangles and square areas in the centre tumble around in space. A twist of perspective pulls us upward. The geometry divides the background into two. Sometimes it seems to be the reverse and the dark space was first, with the playful areas of colour on top of it. The paint is washed away, drips down the canvas or displays thick brushstrokes. In some places, the surface of the paint feels like a velvet blanket, the bark of a tree or a weathered wall. The flat canvas transforms into a space into which you can look. By entering into the painting you are drawn into the movements of the painting process. The painter creates the painting from the inside out; the viewer walks from the outside in.