No longer seeing them

“No longer seeing them”

In previous exhibitions, research into the need for empty spaces has introduced us to the presence of the unpainted.

With Bruno Vande Graaf, the path of the gaze is reversed. Taking interest in abandoned places such as disused suburban houses or industrial wastelands, he stages the absence of life and the disenchantment that comes along with it. This Western emptiness which he shows us is the one that Beckett, Ionesco and Sartre already made us aware of.

Bruno Vande Graaf’s silent paintings find their starting point in an initial photographic survey, entitled “I live in a ghost town”, “Waiting”, “Out of season”, “Containment”, “The thirty glorious years” or “Bunker”, which by themselves announce the main topic: the dehumanization of a faltering modernity.

We usually pass by these places, we walk by them “no longer seeing them”, we prefer to avoid our failings. “The permanent spectacle of these ruins corrodes the minds of the citizens who are subjected to them on a daily basis in an insidious, permanent way, without seeing them” writes Philippe Hemptinne on this subject.

And then, through the magic of the color planes and the reconfiguration of forms, our gaze focuses on new possibilities. Human life has not reappeared for all that, but these places are no longer disused, abandoned, they exist, manifesting themselves as “on hold”.

Simone Schuiten

Transleted by Renaat Beheydt