‘The VORCE’
Or how ‘The Island of Death’ continues to challenge ‘The Divine Comedy’
Prof. Em. Freddy Decreus
The exhibition that Latem's Gallery Ysebaert launches on 23 May 2024 stands out from the start because of a double layering. On the one hand, there is a strong figurative and mythical atmosphere with elements of the classical Greek underworld imagination; on the other hand, you also feel a shocking experience that you can't quite put your finger on and feels unsettling. You visit the exhibition with a mind that thinks Western and therefore rational (the logos), but gradually the ‘numinous’ emerges somewhere here, an incomprehensible dimension that evokes the ‘completely different’. An experience that is very different from what we experience in our daily lives and expresses itself in mythical images and connections that transcend and confuse us. Especially since it also deals with death, a subject that is still taboo today and for which we lack the appropriate rituals.
By calling this exhibition ‘The VORCE’, Steven Peters Caraballo enters the field of psychology and philosophy. ‘The VORCE’ is an intriguing neologism that simultaneously evokes ‘DIVORCE’ and ‘FORCE’, an existential position that is both about separation and loss and the resilience to start again. Farewell and alienation from the old and at the same time a healing imagination within the new. Psychologically important when it deals with personal suffering and loss, culturally challenging when it says something about our times. With an important question: isn't what we think we know as ‘reality’, with our psyche and logos, that is, with all our imaginary world, always just an incomplete canvas, a personal or ideological phantom world that can turn out to be unreal or unfinished at any time?