OPENING
FRIDAY 17.04.15 AT 7PM

EXHIBITION
18.04.15 – 24.05.15

 

 

Put a face on a thing and it will have a fate just like the rest of us. In the case of a humanized match this means that at some point your small head, with barely any charismatic facial features will burn up and the even smaller brain within it too. That’s it. You can also add other matches some of them burning already, others squeaking in fear to give that fate a little social constellation, but it will not change much. Change the fancy background colors too, it will not help. The cork in anticipation of his pull me out destiny is wide awake, while two skinny female visitors already press the bubu-bell out in the corridor with the stripy carpet. The cork in awe is loosely attached to his support, same as with the three puppets downstairs winking and blinking from another era in which puppets still had a say. Rid of strings, but also of any movement, the vintage sneakers, detached and lost in the colorful robes are not really pushing forward and the bronze bas-relief is melting down from two faces into one with two noses.

You could say there is a lose assemblage of decorative things in anticipation, a prefixed future for the matches and two skinny female visitors outside in the corridor with the stripy carpet. The balance between waiting and burning is traditionally hysteric, as sung about in numerous songs about firing it all up, by leading a short intense life of pleasure, pain and full-stop, instead of rotting away for a life span. For the hysteric character these processes of fading are hell, they take too long, are not suitable for the constant display of intensity and come with a lot of boredom and stalemate situations. The hysteric is craving for the new and unknown, but cannot really develop the skills needed to maintain, develop or even understand continuity. In this he is a sociopathic idiot who sparks up the party, funny to have around, but not for too long. He is good at
founding a new city, but very bad at living in it.

But in the show this system, suitable for myths and legends of expressions, is accurately depicted in a graphical language that seems to root in illustrations of that kind that could make you open a junior’s bank account or teach you how to ring somebody’s bell fifty years ago, for example. More educational than explosive, the finishing of the works is final, the sculptural work is not carving but polishing, the paintings are rigidly executed. The matches in Belgium might be called Lucifers too, but the devil is not the one burning. Instead the hellfire smolders under cold, smooth surfaces, freed of any fate, sealed and preserved with tradition and artistic skills. The composition of waiting, wanting, change and the big bird is fixed in a precise form and a continuous praxis that no hysteric could live in for very long and for a match man, this lousy quitter, this is not even a conflict at all.