On the occasion of the exhibition we are presenting a new publication printed by Cassachrome with text by Tamara Beheydt.
Letter to: Dirk Vandereecken (excerpt)
...What strikes me, time and again, about your work, is the apparently complete absence of the artist. The paintings are like samples, cryptic samplings of indeterminable complex visual structures. There is almost no pictorial touch or form of action. There is only the suspicion that an articulated choice was made in favour of an almost mechani- cal process. The works result from a complex process, a lapse in time in which chance and irregularities are incorporated as cognitive factors... I feel it must be almost impossible to decide when a work is finished. There is no time or final touch upon which the painting comes together as a whole. Every work is as it were finished before it is started. And yet, the work is not a mathematical formula put into practice. As an artist, you define the aberra- tions in the image with a particular attitude toward form and image creation. As an artist, you try to create work that not only finds its place in art history, but equally in a context in which images are produced faster than they can be viewed. In a cultural environment in which, to most, pictorial pleasure coincides with the dictates of figuration, your work provides an accurate answer to the diagnosis described above. Your work is a not-knowing and not-sig- nifying, set within the conventional agenda of viewing, and opens up the act of perception in a way that forces the viewer to dismantle every possible pictorial bias.
Philippe Van Cauteren, Ghent, February 2014
Artists: Dirk Vander Eecken