TRANSIT STATION

Passing Remarks on Transience

Christophe Van Eecke

Man stands between past and future. Therefore every moment and every place he occupies are intermediate stations, links between what has been and what is still to come. Man is the junction of that constant movement from past to future. He is the gateway, the point where time and space make their progress felt. But as a species man is in constant development, too. Evolutionary theory teaches that every manifestation of any species is but a stage in a continuous development. Everything is temporary. Man is an effect of evolution but not its end result or its goal. Evolution continues and one day man as we know him today is likely to disappear again and become a mere memory, an abandoned way station. Man is homo viator, always on the road and never at home.

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Certain places bear the traces of the endless movement of time and space that passes through us. Border crossings are such places, but so are warehouses, airports and roadside motels. The romance of such places lies in their abandonment: they are never anyone’s destination. They are places for stopovers, temporary and imperfect. Just as time and space move through homo viator, homo viator in turn moves through these places and leaves behind the residue of human presence in the shape of empty beer cans, cigarette-ends, plastic bags full of garbage, torn condoms and crushed gravel. What fascinates us in images of empty hotel rooms, desolate factories and derelict hotels is the romance of decay. These places display the abandonment they have experienced at the hands of the people who moved on. Peeling wallpaper, weathered walls, empty chairs, rusted machines and leaking ceilings are traces of vanished occupants.

The essence of a transit station is its emptiness. It is a place where someone has been, someone may be in the future, but that has essentially been abandoned by all, no matter how many people may be present (passing through) on any given moment. The transit station is a landscape without a maker, orphaned architecture that is not claimed by anyone. It is a place that belongs to no one. That is also the reason why we can feel strangely at home there. Belonging to everyone and no one in particular these places have a generic anonymity. They furnish us with the rudiments of home in the most unobtrusive way possible. They are designed to accommodate the needs of the body for the night. Their impersonality is soothing to the wearied body and mind of the traveller because it makes no demands on them. The transit station does not need to be liked, desired or found beautiful. It is simply there, not to be noticed.

The island of Malta is such a place. One hardly ever hears of it and yet it is there and for many centuries was a crucial port of call for travellers to the East. The fort of Saint James Cavalier in Valletta was built by the Knights of Malta. It has functioned both as a passageway to the East, a transit station for trade and travel, and a bulwark against the threat of Islam. As such it is emblematic for the transience of a transit station. It was built to be passed through. But it also seems to symbolise all our fears about the possible disappearance of Europe, destroyed by the barbarians at its gates. Even today, the fear of Islam overtaking European culture is the fear that our way of life is itself only a transit station in the history of mankind. It seems intolerable to think that what we have built is not meant to endure. As the last port of call before one enters the alien world of foreign cultures, Malta is by nature a transit station. And now four artists call on it to become temporary inhabitants of its fortress.

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The works of the four artists in this exhibition all address the non-place that is the transit station. The impersonal and transitory character of the transit station, its curious ability to be everywhere and nowhere (because all transit stations are so much alike) is expressed in these works’ lack of an established point of view. But this lack does not mean that something is missing. Rather, it means that something is being withheld by the works themselves. By not granting us steady ground to stand on the works shift our perception and suspend the relation between their image and our perception of it. The works look back at us as much as we look at them. They show us spaces, but just like the transit station these spaces are neither here nor nowhere: they are a non-place, an uncanny realm of uprooted experience. The point of view in these works is transient: it refuses to settle down and when we try to take hold of it, it solemnly takes its leave.

A transient gaze never settles down, it is restless. It passes over many images, sees many landscapes, but does not keep everything together in a unified view. What remains, is a patchwork of impressions, a collage of places and fragments that are recognisable, oddly familiar, and yet profoundly alien because of the incongruous way in which they come together in the mind. The landscapes of Christian Noirfalise are collages of such elements. If we merely glance at his works, they seem familiar enough and remind us of colourful postcards, exotic sets from 1950s B-movies or tourist pictures from brochures about the sun or the Alps. But when looked at up close they are patchworks of views and sites that do not seem to belong to the same world. Noirfalise’s works show us fabricated landscapes that combine elements seen from many different perspectives. The works in their entirety are the sum of these perspectives and therefore have no point of view of their own. They are afloat in a constant blurring of geography. They are mental states rather than actual places. They are space conceived as the assembly of uprooted fragments stolen from memory.

The transience and ephemeral nature of point of view are nowhere more apparent than in the work of Olphaert den Otter, which stands in the tradition of the trompe-l’oeil in its most ambitious form: the ceiling fresco. A painting on a ceiling is never simply a picture in a plane. The surface on which it is painted is often curved, it may have odd angles, different levels, slanted parts and columns or other fixtures that block or interrupt the field of vision. All these challenges to perception must be taken into account by the artist, who will often have to resort to extreme foreshortening or other forms of visual morphing to create images that will look good from ground level. The actual painted shapes may be elongated, twisted or deformed to accommodate the irregularities in the painted surface, but from the vantage point of the viewer everything will look normal and in perfect proportion. When attempting such works, point of view, and especially shifts in point of view, are crucial to the way the work will be seen and read.

In this mode Olphaert den Otter has painted a trompe-l’oeil cabin on the walls and ceiling of a room. The image is meant to be seen from the entrance to the room, which is the vantage point from which the perspective of the work has been conceived. Once the viewer enters the room, the image comes apart and reveals its visual trickery: the many manipulations of shapes, lines and curves that the artist must resort to to create the illusion of perspective. The work announces its artificiality and its virtual nature. It is as if one were suddenly inside the image that one had first only perceived. One is made aware of the work’s structure and its principles of construction. What seemed like a picture seen from a definite point of view is now revealed to be a combination of many points of view that one never encounters in the real world. The artist has drawn the cabin not as it is, but as it must be in order to be perceived as real.

If the unravelling of perspective brings to light the fabric from which the image is constructed, there is yet another undoing at work in Den Otter’s cabin. The entire image is drawn in pastel, which is an extremely sensitive material. If touched, it crumbles. In time (and this time will undoubtedly come soon in the shape of a subsequent exhibition) the image will be whitewashed, painted over or otherwise erased. And even if this did not happen, it would simply disappear of its own accord. As such, the cabin reminds us that there is no such thing as infinite existence, not for cabins, not for Europe as we know it and maybe not even for art. We may like to think that we build for eternity, but eternity has made other plans. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: all human endeavour is finite and our monuments will inevitably crumble, sooner rather than later.

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The paintings of Jean-Marie Bytebier look familiar. They are, it would seem, landscapes with all their appropriate furnishings: trees, a patch of sky, grass, birds. But they are not. A landscape is normally presented to us from a point of view. The viewer is usually able to determine where he or she would stand in relation to the landscape if the image were part of the real world (or if the viewer were part of the world represented in the image). There is no such point of view in Bytebier’s works. Of our four artists, his subversion of point of view is the most subtle and the least noticeable. This makes his work much more unruly for it is easy to mistake it for mere landscape painting. But there is no grounding in his images. These landscapes are not really seen anywhere by anyone: they are wholly virtual and seem to hover in space and time. They resist any kind of focus. It is almost impossible to determine how far or how close one should stand to get the correct vantage point to look at these canvases. Space in these works is constantly rubbing us the wrong way. One cannot reach out to them and establish a human relation to them. They are simply out of reach.

Bytebier’s images are at once eminently recognisable and eminently elusive. They attract us with their deceptively seductive charm and then push the gaze away again because we cannot enter them. Here we see the everyday being made alien. If these landscapes were put on the wall of a dining room, one imagines they would start sucking in their surroundings. They simply refuse to be decorative. However beautiful they are, they have a stubborn resilience to the gaze. And once the viewer realises that these works allow of no vantage point, everything once again comes apart. Our sense of scale flounders. Mass, distance and sense of space are impotent in relation to these images. Everything in these landscapes is in immaculate suspension. They are sublime moments extracted from the act of vision: they represent the moment when the image swallows the perceiver. They represent the moment when we plunge into a work of art and seem unable to get away from it.

And finally, the image seems to swallow itself. The transient point of view closes in on itself and leaves part of the canvas bare. Or has it sucked up its image? The landscape in these seemingly unfinished canvases is halted, suspended. But is the image being erased from the bottom up or is it growing from the top down like a fungus would make its way down the fabric of the canvas? By leaving the lower part of the canvas blank, any relation to the work is called into question: we do not know where we stand. The image hovers in spatial limbo and mocks our desire to locate it. It mocks our desire to make art speak to us. But the work refuses to speak and challenges us to think. It challenges us to dare stand in relation to it, which would mean that we accept its lack of point of view. It means we let go of our own point of view and allow ourselves to be uprooted, lifted up or erased, like the image. By throwing us back upon ourselves the work invites us to join it in its pervasive nowhereness. It invites us to be everywhere and nowhere and exist in the mode of the transit station: aloft.

If we take that leap into the sublime, we enter another dimension where space takes on a different, limitless sense. The paintings of Kris Van Dessel show us worlds that are so obviously afloat that it seems bootless to even entertain the idea of a steady point of view. His worlds are fragmented, blasted, whirling or breathtakingly expansive. There is no grounding, no vantage point here. There is barely even landscape. And yet we look at them and experience space in relation to them. But space in Van Dessel’s work is at once overwhelmingly broad in scope and stiflingly claustrophobic in mood: stretched beyond endurance, but also aggressively crowded. To perceive these works, we must leap into them. There is no getting away from these works: they take hold of the gaze and draw it in. They engulf and disquiet.

Space has been called the final frontier. But it isn’t. What makes space at once infinite and suffocating is its endlessness, the very fact that it has no borders. Gazing up at the stars at night we are sometimes overwhelmed by this double pull. On the one hand, we feel infinitely small, dwarfed by that huge expanse and somehow comforted by the knowledge that all our earthly endeavours are really of no consequence on the scale of infinity. But on the other hand the sky seems to revolve around us, we loose our footing and seem to be falling into space. Odd as it may seem, the infinite openness of the heavens seems to crush us and we feel claustrophobic. It is this paradox of expansive space that can be seen in the work of Kris Van Dessel. There is epic movement in these canvases and virile shifts of form and mass. In their purest form, they become sheer gesture; but it is the impersonal gesture of space itself, impassively going about its infinite tectonic business.

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To stand on the threshold of infinity, as we do when we look up at the night sky, is to be humbled. We perceive our insignificance, the transience of our short passage through this world. Since philosophy began, man has made himself the measure of the universe. Transit stations make space and time the measure of us. Soon, we too will be left by the side of the roads of time. And although we may leave some traces behind, future generations will build over them. All is open and infinite. It is our human condition to live with the knowledge of our transience. But this knowledge has its small comforts. One of them is our ability to appreciate decay. To look at ruins, derelict motels and peeling wallpaper and see our humility reflected there. We see these things only in a passing glance as we ourselves journey from our past to our future, which is definitely circumscribed by the horizon of our finite lifespan. But it is in our greatest creations, in our works of art, that we leave behind the firmest and most moving traces of that finite being. What is beauty if not the fabric of all our transit stations combined to form an image of our deepest nature: melancholy.

ORGANIZED POSTPONEMENT.

The Paintings of Jean-Marie Bytebier

      Italo Calvino once said that his method consisted in eliminating everything that was superfluous. There is a ravaging beauty in a work of art that has been reduced to its essence. The perfect work, like a perfectly cut diamond, is no longer held down by any ballast. It says what needs to be said with the strictest economy of means. This is also the method that Jean-Marie Bytebier uses. He paints and repaints his canvases until there is nothing left that is not entirely necessary. However, in doing so, he does not aim to create a crystalline perfection. By eliminating the superfluous he opens up an infinity inside the image.

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      Jean-Marie’s paintings constantly withhold their meaning from us. His canvases have an ambiguity that is nowhere resolved because there are no iconographical holds at hand to ground his images. We recognise the sky, foliage, some details that might suggest the presence of birds or even wind, but there is nothing there giving these images narrative content. Treetops seem to have been indiscriminately cropped by the edge of the image. The distance between foreground and background, between heaven and earth, is disrupted because these canvases deny us a human measure to fathom them. The images remain indifferent to our need for legibility. They lack all points of reference. Therefore they take away the possibility of an ending. There is no closure in these works. The viewer who tries to penetrate them is constantly thrown back upon himself.

      The absence of visual or narrative closure takes an image to the very edge of abstraction, confronting the viewer with a new question concerning her own point of view, in the sense that she must ask herself where she stands in relation to this image. The viewer is compelled to take the elements in the image and construct her own meaning. She must figure out for herself where she stands, both figuratively (what does the image mean to me?) and literally (from which vantage point can I conceive of meaning in this image?). By constantly folding back upon themselves in this way, Jean-Marie’s paintings generate infinite movement. Constantly shifting, the works retain their autonomy in relation to their audience. This also means that they cannot be consumed in a passing glance. The images demand our attention. Jean-Marie likes to call this the third dimension is his work: an invisibility, something that disappears in the folds of the image.

      This third dimensions lies in the fact that the images are not objects, but a dialogue that keeps repeating itself with new variations. This dialogue is at least partly set in motion by the creation of visual hybrids: Jean-Marie brings together elements that have no intrinsic link with each other. If this sounds like alchemy, it is meant to, because Jean-Marie does not bring together incongruous objects in the surrealist way of, say, Magritte. He combines properties. For instance, the blue of the sky will be painted over the hue of skin. The resulting tone is an amalgam of both layers of paint, a new colour that dialectically transcends its component parts. But not just properties create infinite movement in these paintings. The very instruments of Jean-Marie’s painting are involved in this process. For instance, Jean-Marie does not dilute his colours with clear water, but with rainwater that has turned green in its cup. This brackish water is a carrier of history: during its life cycle it has made contact with many objects and surfaces, sliding along them and picking up minute particles. In using this water to paint, a fetishistic deposit of all those materials occurs in the painting. That way, an invisible infinity is locked inside the materiality of the image. The work is more than the sum of canvas, pigment and water, it is a reservoir of meanings and memories, laden with hidden history.

      Window frames are a central motif in Jean-Marie’s paintings. The motif was lifted from a fresco by Giotto in which the image of a small barred window occurred. Jean-Marie integrated this image in his own paintings and started to create variations on its theme. Frames have a double function in his work. On the one hand they obviously frame the composition. On the other hand they look out at what is on the other side of the window. Thus, the frame of the painting and the window frame (which might be the subject of the painting) are very often conflated. The result of this framing is that the image seen through the window is set apart from its surroundings. It becomes an enclosed area that attracts the gaze, a field of vision where the common rules of looking no longer apply because the link with the everyday world has been cut.

      But Jean-Marie often paints not just a window frame but the very frame of the canvas. Instead of framing his works, he paints them as framed. And once the frame is painted around the image, he will often open it up again. This is done in a series of canvases called Unfinished in which either the image itself or the painted frame around it are left unfinished. However, this suggestion of nonfinito is itself an illusion, because Jean-Marie has really taken these paintings beyond completion. They are not really unfinished: the Unfinished paintings are finished paintings that have been painted over again to make them look unfinished. The actual image has been covered by a new image that suggests a prepared but empty or unfinished canvas containing hesitant shapes, smudges of paint and lines that halt without purpose.

      In making such seemingly unfinished works, Jean-Marie almost refrains from painting. It seems as if he is only handing us the tools with which to construct an image. By stressing the fact that paintings are objects made by human hand, the image-maker himself seems to take his leave. But this is the illusion, for the leave-taking is the image. What these paintings portray, is the halted movement of a painter preparing his instruments and then failing to construct the anticipated image. If any image is to appear, the viewer will have to construct it in her mind from a vantage point she herself is going to have to determine. The gaze only meets its own tools. What it is hoping to see, the finished image that would give it closure, is indefinitely postponed. Jean-Marie paints this postponement. That way, his paintings resemble objects receding into the distance. But there is often a moment when they seem to linger on the horizon before disappearing entirely. It is within this fault-line between the visible and the invisible that Jean-Marie is painting, creating images that halt time and capture the fleeting moment of its disappearance.

      ***

      Playing with time is a cinematic endeavour. Within the visual arts, painting and cinema seem to be at opposite ends. The painter is condemned to work within a single image, whereas the filmmaker can create endless series of images. This makes cinema very well-suited to narration: it has an element of duration, and duration enables the exposition of elements in time. Painting cannot do this. That is to say: if painting wants to introduce a temporal element, the duration must be condensed into one image. The moment would have to be elongated. This is exactly what Jean-Marie’s paintings do. Whether they are involving their spectators in an endless circle of meaning or entertaining their departure through fragmentary framing, they always lock us up in the moment. They are an invitation and a task to take time to contemplate the inward infinity of a moment: an elusive lapse in time that is given precarious form in Jean-Marie’s paintings. The third dimension in these works is therefore what it always was: depth. But it is not the depth of the visual field. It is the depth of a moment, digging up infinity. To look at these images, is to defer to time.

Christophe Van Eecke

PERSTEKST:

De Visuele Compositie van de Plaats

Er verandert iets in de kunst. Steeds meer kunstenaars onderzoeken opnieuw de essentie van hun activiteit: de instrumenten waarmee ze werken en de wereld die ze in het kunstwerk creëren. ‘De Visuele Compositie van de Plaats’ brengt werken samen die de bakens uitzetten van nieuwe routes die kunstenaars volgen om hun medium te bevragen en sluit zich aan bij oude bakens die vergeten leken maar vandaag weer brandend actueel zijn. Het startpunt is de ‘plaats’: de manier waarop in kunst een fictieve ruimte wordt gecreëerd, in het kunstwerk, maar ook in de museumruimte en in de wisselwerking tussen kunstwerk en toeschouwer. De verschillende aspecten van de compositie van de plaats worden gemarkeerd door een unieke selectie werken van (invoegen: lijst van alle exposerende kunstenaars).

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Hoe groot is een plaats? Zo groot als mijn blikveld? Een kamer? Of zo groot als de kleinste cel van een organisme? Is een plaats een punt? Of heeft ze omvang? Is er plaats in de plaats? Omvat een plaats het perifere blikveld? Is mijn plaats beperkt tot de ruimte die ik inneem met mijn lichaam? Tot de ruimte waarnaar ik kan uitreiken met mijn handen? De ruimte die ik kan zien? Is deze kamer een plaats? En de ruimte buiten het raam, maakt die deel uit van de plaats? En zo ja, hoe ver? Zo ver als mijn handen reiken of zo ver als mijn blik reikt? En een lichaam dat zichzelf streelt, raakt dat een plaats aan op de huid? Of is de plaats van het lichaam de ruimte van de roes? En waar eindigt die? Waar is die plaats na het orgasme? En twee lichamen die elkaar aanraken? Omcirkelen zij een plaats? En wat is die plaats? De leegte van het verlangen? En is de wereld om die lichamen heen ook een plaats? Maar ruimte rond een kern, is dat niet de antithese van een plaats? Is een plaats niet veeleer iets dat kan worden omringd en dus begrensd?

Deze vragen confronteren ons met de onmogelijkheid om een plaats geografisch of geometrisch af te bakenen. Een plaats ruimtelijk bepalen, is bijna onmogelijk. Een plaats is dan ook geen locatie, maar een beleving. Mijn plaats is de ruimte in de wereld waar ik me thuis weet. Plaatselijkheid is een vorm van geborgenheid, het is in-de-wereld-zijn, en dat betekent: in relatie staan tot je omgeving. De omgeving waarop ik betrokken ben, is mijn plaats. Ze is elastisch, want ze krimpt in als ik de gordijnen sluit en rekt open als ik de deur uitga. Als de wereld mij vreemd wordt, als ik word bevangen door claustrofobie of het onbehagen van een bevreemdende vijandigheid in de muren of de struiken om mijn heen, ben ik ontheemd. Dan is de omgeving niet langer mijn thuis en ben ik er niet langer op mijn plaats. Dan wordt mijn plaats gereduceerd tot haar elementairste vorm: een wijkplaats in mezelf waarin ik beschutting zoek voor de wereld. Plaats is dan ook geen ruimte. Een plaats is de relatie van een bewustzijn tot zijn omgeving. Het is een bevindelijkheid. Een plaats is waar men zich aanwezig weet.

Bonnard werd door de ziekte van zijn vrouw aan het echtelijk huis gekluisterd. Gedwongen binnenshuis te werken, ontdekte hij de eindeloze mogelijkheden van een beperkte ruimte en schilderde hij dezelfde kamers in steeds nieuwe perspectieven en doorzichten. Het is dan ook verbazingwekkend hoe veelvormig een alledaagse ruimte wordt als men er met een zoekende blik naar kijkt. Zelfs de meest banale ruimte is een spel van vormen, kleuren en licht, van lijnen en vlakken die samen een perspectief vormen dat wisselt met elke beweging van de persoon die zich door die ruimte beweegt. Kunstenaars hebben verschillende technieken en instrumenten ter beschikking om die veelvoudigheid van de plaats vorm te geven. De meest elementaire is het standpunt dat ze innemen. Maar ook het perspectief, de schaal waarop dingen worden afgebeeld en de afstand tussen de toeschouwer en de objecten in het werk geven mee vorm aan de plaats die in een schilderij tot stand komt. Het meest elementaire element is echter licht. Licht is immers wat alle zien mogelijk maakt. Zonder licht kan er geen ruimte worden waargenomen en kan er dus geen plaats ontstaan.

Maar een plaats is niet alleen wat zich in het huis afspeelt, het is ook wat je door de ramen ziet en hoe je daarnaar kijkt. Iedere plaats breekt open naar buiten toe. Geen enkele plaats kan worden omschreven zonder verwijzing naar een buiten. Omschrijven is letterlijk in grenzen vatten, ergens een lijn rond trekken en vervolgens beschrijven wat zich binnen de lijn bevindt. De omschrijving is als een magische cirkel waarbinnen de plaats ontstaat. Maar een lijn is een grens tussen twee velden en een plaats is pas een plaats indien ze zich, als omschreven gebied, in een wijder veld bevindt. Dit is de intentionaliteit van de plaats, analoog aan wat Husserl de intentionaliteit van het bewustzijn noemt: bewustzijn is altijd bewustzijn van iets, het is intentioneel, betrokken op iets. Op dezelfde manier is een plaats altijd een plaats in een ruimte, een relatie tot wat niet de plaats is maar integendeel de plaats omgordt en haar zodoende toelaat zich als plaats te bepalen, dat wil zeggen: de plaats te omschrijven, letterlijk en figuurlijk.

De intentionaliteit van de plaats kan zich op verschillende manieren manifesteren. De verdekte opstelling van de gluurder geeft de relatie met de wereld vorm als een afscherming. De gluurder wil de wereld namelijk enkel op zijn eigen voorwaarden binnenlaten, op de manier en in de mate waarin hij haar begluurt. Het tegendeel van deze glurende houding zou de intentionaliteit van de bedlegerige persoon kunnen zijn die niets liever wil dan de muren van zijn plaats te slopen en de wereld binnen te laten. Tussen deze beide extremen zijn vele modulaties mogelijk. Voor al die mogelijke vormen van intentionaliteit geldt echter dat ze de stemming van de plaats bepalen. Als wij begeren, depressief zijn of de wereld buiten willen houden, is deze beleving een functie van hoe wij ons tot de wereld verhouden. Een plaats is dan ook altijd gestemd: getekend door de relatie tussen de waarnemer en de ruimte waarin hij zich aantreft. Wanneer deze relatie verstoord is, kan de waarnemer echter zijn plaats verliezen. Dit plaatsverlies is het ontkiemen van het sublieme. En waar het sublieme verschijnt, komt de compositie van de plaats in het gedrang.

Christophe Van Eecke