Selection by Paul Dujardin

In 2010 I took my daughter Anna to visit Watou. A wonderful place were traces of the border landscape and the village architecture affect our mood. Where, during the summer months, you encounter art and poetry in naked form. No space for empty theatricality.

As if by a sledgehammer I was hit by La nuit désire la reine, le roi perd son sang (The Night Desires the Queen, the King Loses his Blood). Philippe Vandenberg tears open nine canvasses with language and charcoal. Through writing the word becomes image. The territory of each separate canvas is anything but virgin. The canvasses are stained, trampled, wiped off, affected.

Within that lived space, the painter writes-draws word signs with an unfathomable depth of collective and personal meanings. A battlefield of biblical, fairytale, mythological and worldly associations circles around the black panel in the middle.

In the centre, the space opens backwards, like the gaping hole behind a doorway. Two ladders become visible in that indefinable black hole. And I imagine how each human being must venture the leap day after day. Full of yearning and bearing the scars we sustain on our way, we must manage to create some sense, as the trapeze artists we are in the hollowness of the universe.