When drawing becomes so intense that it can no longer be fixed to a single surface,
an expansion becomes necessary. In this movement, I repeatedly explore how
reality resists being pinned down, instead continually reshaping itself — in lines, in
smears, in voids. For me, drawing is not a reproduction of my immediate
surroundings, but a way of being present within them. Small notes of the rooms
where I live and work — spaces in which an intimate atmosphere is questioned by
echoes of the outside world — form the basis for being “copied” again and
transformed into new works on paper and canvas. By reflecting with paint and
pencil, I make visible what invisibly accumulates there: inhabited time.

After a long period, I have returned to a dialogue with oil paint on canvas. My
training once led me toward painting, yet my hand has always remained that of a
draftsman. It is there, in that field of tension, that the paint, guided by my hand as a
draftsman, does not conceal but affirms the painting as a drawing. This tension
takes on different forms in my recent work. Some pieces almost casually limit
themselves to an initial wash, as a reference to the underdrawing. In others, I allow
the unprepared surface to speak, causing the painted line to falter. In the large
canvas, I restrict myself to an alphabet of graphic forms: lines that I draw as
contours (outline) and then fill in (fill). This alphabet functions simultaneously as a
system of signs and a system of memory — the contour as order, the filling-in as
recollection. A simple gesture, almost humorous yet without laughter — a tache de
beauté.

That alphabet once emerged from a digital work, Tik Tak — a series of animations
in which lines, 6,013 in total, move from one drawing to another until a new image
becomes visible. From that digital wandering, I return to the origin: observation. On
paper, the most direct medium, everything finds coherence again — lines as
alphabet, smears as wash, emptiness as support. What role does process play in all
of this? And what remains of drawing when it begins to speak through another
medium?

A double movement runs through this exhibition: drawing as a rational game,
drawing as sensuous Kairos — a moment of intensity and presence. Can this
tension open onto another reality? Paint appears as line, graphite as veil. The
canvas itself becomes the “room” in which that which adheres, shifts, or dissolves
finds resonance: a skin in which the image slowly detaches itself from the visible.
There, the line — once contour — becomes a grammar of moving time, beginning to
speak its own fundamental language — between revealing and concealing, between
hope and melancholy. What normally disappears remains here — as residue, as
excess. What does it mean that it is precisely this residue that becomes visible?
 

Steven Baelen

 

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