With (A)VOID I evoke the tension between emptiness and avoidance.
The verb to avoid means to escape or to keep away from. A void is an emptiness. The title of the exhibition represents the escape from emptiness, that emptiness which, however, is also embraced. The void is like a recurring, necessary trigger for action. The naked canvas is a the blank sheet from which a story is written.
From the blank, each painting - together with me - builds its own story. Each work tells the story of the road it travelled. That road is not pre-programmed or mapped out but drives itself. Each painting tells its own course, along meanders, over bumps and curves, stalled by unforeseen or self-induced and challenging deviations that simultaneously torment and propel me forward. Often the previous elaborations inspire the next steps.
There is a duality both in my sources of inspiration, in the opus moderandi and in the mood of the day. Bitten by painting, I appeal to its legacy, not least its abstract chapters. Those achievements - their different shades and points of view - are placed on and next to each other, in an attempt to interact, in an attempt to reconcile. Call it synthesis.
Constructivism, suprematism, abstract expressionism, colorfield painting and everything in its aftermath, I allow to interact with my very free form of painting where the paint takes over from me. The door is ajar and external factors breeze right in. Circumstances and coincidence intervene in the pictorial debate under my approving eye. They prevent a work from being multiplicative.
Experimental contemporary music, jazz and improvisation are also some of my hobbyhorses. They ensure that I attach great importance to the factor of time and movement.
However, time and movement are problematic once a painting is considered complete and only the solidified state of a whole series of actions and decisions becomes visible.
But I always look for an answer and a solution in the suggestion of movement and dynamics. I try to escape the static condition of the painting by letting the process read in its various stages. And the viewer is my sharer.
It is with pleasure that I make my works look unfinished. They are slipped, washed away, not quite polished. The transparencies, paint-outs of small wars, chinks and empty zones, create spaciousness and mobility. They allow the work to breathe and take place.
Not infrequently, therefore, I use the term Present Continuous as a handle. This openness makes the viewer a witness to the creative process, which is nothing more than a coincidence of composition and performance. There is, however, noise on the chronology of the recomposition of the process (wink)... “
Bart Vandevijvere, September 2021