WREK: paint it black

We could sit at Le Kabinet for hours on end. Watch and explore the curling, constantly transforming pages of black ink against the wall, in their varying textures and shades of intensity in the shifting light. We could reflect on the passage of time, the repetitiveness of life, the fleeting nature of memories, our ways of coping with this human condition that we – mistakenly – feel exists outside ourselves. We could concoct modes of rebellion, and art would be one. We could consider the meaning of such an undertaking, the goals we set ourselves, the limits to our love. We could think of time as the intangible taking form, occupying a space within these pages. Of this aged “rollertabletower” tainted with ink stains – with an engraving press and a DIY metal construction on top – as a work of art in itself. We could think of a million times we felt life spoke less about life than art did, of a million times we felt we were all wrong. We could go back to the pages, and ask “What are you hiding? Who are you trying to fool?” We could fill our minds with meaningless meaning or questions not going anywhere. We could think of Malevich. Of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller’s colourful youths Nancy and Fritzi, a naughty girl and a naughty boy captured in moments of creation and revelation, brought back to the basics of white paper, black ink, and animated on the wall. We could admire the craftsmanship of woodcutting, the genius and madness of using it as a basis for cinema. We could look at the wonderfully tactile nature of WREK’s practice, the obsessive, maniacal character of their art, the unrelenting nature of creation, the overgrown passion, and the crazy joy. At the art of hitting walls, falling down, getting up, and repeating that process over and over again. At the love of paper that resonates in this tiny place, this Kabinet of curiosities. We could think up all the blacks in the world, and how none of them resembles the ones in front of us. We could imagine Olivier Deprez and Miles O Shea as researchers running circles in the debris, knowing what it is that we merely skirt around. We could place this moment in an apocalyptic setting, and say that, if all the world were crumbling, we would like to keep those few places where art is an encounter, a shared experience. A prosaic act, a poetic gesture, nothingness, a blank page drenched in black. We could do all that, and would consider it one of a multitude of possibilities, constantly transforming and passing with time.

WREK: THE NAUGHTY GIRL & THE NAUGHTY BOY ••••
> 3/6 (finissage: 3/6, 14.00), Le Kabinet, lekabinetbxl.wordpress.com