BART DE BAERE

”The black in-between the filmic images”

Bart De Baere: It is the ability to keep the objects free of petrifaction, three -dimensional in the strict sense, sealed off from the different temporal approaches from which they come and in which they remain. It is ability to prevent the material presence of the work becoming , in its domain – the domain of artistic thoughts – a reproduction which is as flat as a newspaper photo. Through this continuum from the idea up to some of the possibilities of realization, experience is urged to go back and forth between perception and the consideration of potential accents in the interpretation. (…) It is condition of which one could also say that it is in a flux. The “doubt” is a precise choice in itself, one has that is hard to realize in a society that has remained us to turn everything into products.

Roza El-Hassan: I am not sure that I would place this in opposition to society. There is a tendency to turn everything into products – which is usually characterized by its commercial roots – and statements, though this is only one part, more superficial. On the other hand, doubt about identity and system was wide spread in Germany in the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, when I lived there, and now it is even more present in our society, when a democratic system is trying to establish itself in what seems to be a post-democratic time. But also to discuss this would lead us too far from our subject.

Bart De Baere: The offer of experience – the intermediary between subject and object – is developed in such a way that the work suggests continuation rather than finalisation. The needles prickthe stone, they may go deeper or be taken out. (…) Therewith themain attention in fact goes to modes and moods of relation. It is these that contain the core of the work. The form is time after time a relationship between forms. Instead of the outlines it is the lines inside which make the result appear, instead of the skeleton it is the system that make the flesh work, and within that it is even the lymph glands rather than the vascular system. To make it possible for this to emerge a proper approach has to be followed, in which a distinction between major structure and ultimate detail becomes meaningless and in which it is the characterization of the connections and of their behaviour in time which is highlighted.

Catalogue, Knoll Galerie Wien–Budapest, 1996