Ohne Titel @KunstVerein Ahlen
Philippe Vancauteren had just started as director of SMAK and he invited me to make an exhibition for Kunstverein Ahlen in Germany.The space there was much too big for me, I didn’t have enough works, let alone works with which I wanted to be seen. I painted an elementary landscape in green-key and blue-key with the horizon at my eye level on one (32 metre long) wall of the room. The room was darkened and 7 slide projectors were used to project light patches in the format of classic landscape paintings from various museum collections on top of it. The height of those patches was adjusted according to the position of the horizon on the paintings. In presentations, paintings are always hung with the centre at “eye level”, which usually varies from 155 to 160 cm. I found that when showing landscapes with a visible infinite horizon, a problem arose and adjusted the horizon of all those landscapes to my own eye height. Since then, the horizon, the subjective line that separates the visible from the invisible, has been a motif that recurs in many of my works.