Visual Artist
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Per destare l'ingegno


Lisette Pelsers

On a table in front of the window in Frank Van den Broeck's studio, there is a small group of shadowy forms. The cool, slightly diffuse back lighting, entering from a shady garden, sharpens the contours of the forms. They are a series of heads-but heads in which the suggestions of noses or eyes can suddenly be erased if they are viewed from a different angle or in a different light. The only uncompromising feature is a wide-open mouth, so that the heads seem to be expressing themselves in a scream of the senses, in desire or in the throes of death, which remains indefinable. Their state of mind is elusive. Their identity, their ultimate shape-if there is one-seems not to be fixed. The pale colour intensifies the impression of blankness, as if the minimally modelled contours still have to take on colour and substance. The compact grouping of the heads on the little table, however random it may be, also raises questions about their relationship to one another. Do they derive from one another? Who was there first? Later, when they are relinquished to the public, will they form an entity or will they be presented as individuals? In their present position they look like a group of actors in a play that has yet to be conceived. The actors are there, but they have yet to go on stage, their roles and their relationships to one another still have to take shape.
Asked about the origins of these wonderful forms, their creator gives a surprisingly prosaic answer-a block of clay. The heads are ceramic; the ones in the studio have not yet been fired. Their shades reflect the stages in the drying process of the clay: from its original grey to the off-white that lends them the air of phantasms.
Frank Van den Broeck does not mystify. And looked at closely, the heads themselves do not conceal their origins: they are flattened on one side so that a sharp edge is created, recalling the lump of clay set vertically on the wheel. And yet this rather mundane aspect in itself contributes to the elusiveness of the heads. The smooth side detracts from their spatial quality, their backs are not worked out. They have not been made entirely 'in the round'. And so they seem to hover somewhere between three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality.
The heads are recent; the first of them was made in 2001. They spring from their creator's 'craving for space', but their progenitors were confined to the flat surface, in pencil, chalk, ink, pastels, watercolour and oils. The heads have a close affinity to their predecessors. Van den Broeck has succeeded in retaining the elusive and indefinable quality of his two-dimensional figures. The illusions of the flat surface are translated into these 'concrete' objects which, for all their substance, have a decidedly evanescent quality.

At the beginning of his career, Frank Van den Broeck drew. Until 1983 he worked exclusively in black and white-in pencil, charcoal or Siberian chalk. His liking for these materials stems from, among other things, his interest in old films by directors like Hitchcock and Visconti and in nineteenth-century photography. In the films the contrasts between light and shade are significant elements in building up the drama; the black and white images are as it were 'coloured' by the rich variation in shades of grey. Van den Broeck also made use of the many nuances between black and white, and he does not regard his drawings as monochromes. Quite soon, from 1983 onwards, he also started to use 'real' colours, initially in pastels, later in oils, watercolour and acrylics. Which of these materials he chose was a fairly intuitive matter. Sometimes Van den Broeck worked in several techniques together, sometimes there were periods when he worked in a single medium. The handwriting remained largely the same, although the oil paintings of the 1990s, in particular, are more densely worked and much more hermetic than the drawings, which are literally more open. But it is always the contour, set down in a few direct lines, the supporting element, which reveals that whatever material he works in, Frank Van den Broeck is first and foremost a draughtsman. In his most recent works he employs combinations of pen, ink and pastels, he uses a brush to put down almost calligraphic figures in acrylics and water, and he has gone back to the old pencil and chalk.
The material and the opportunities it offers are a direct inspiration for his work. To a certain extent the material also mediates the process of drawing. In drawing it is essentially a matter of doing or, as Van den Broeck says, 'looking at what I do'. But there is always a stimulus beforehand, which lies outside the work, a deliberately chosen motif. This can be banal in the extreme. An early chalk drawing, dating from 1983, refers to a scene in an Alfred Hitchcock film, where Cary Grant puts his feet up on a table and the camera zooms in on the soles of his shoes. Anyone familiar with the background will recognize those soles in the drawing. However, this is essentially irrelevant.
In Van den Broeck's work, a motif, however figurative and specific its impulse may have been, is predominantly form. It develops independently as form, unhampered by any preconceived significance or symbolism. Thus, further on in the oeuvre, the double form of the soles of the shoes appears as a butterfly, as a pair of binoculars or as two loops. The form is constantly recharged, filled with ever changing meanings and associations. 'The subjects adapt to the work, they allow themselves to be kneaded, and I regard that as fundamental', says Van den Broeck.(*)
From the mid-1980s, the drawings started to form series. Chains of associations were created by recurring and partly overlapping motifs. Butterflies, faces, skulls, masks, looping eights, palettes, lenses, binoculars, keyholes. Nothing stops the creator-nor, for that matter, the viewer-from constantly seeing something different again in a motif. The meaning, even the form, it assumes in the work is not fixed. Van den Broeck does not design puzzles or riddles with one solution; he creates 'open' images-open to different interpretations.
His artistic memory is a responsive reservoir of potential motifs. They bear witness to his wide-ranging cultural interests, in music, literature, architecture, photography and art, but may also spring from everyday life. Everything he has ever seen, read, heard or experienced can, sometimes much later, be an inspiration for his work.

Frank Van den Broeck does not, however, make his work to record things or to define them. Their purpose is to evoke something, and that something depends in part on his own state of mind and on the viewer's. He is not concerned with translating a preconceived idea, a thought, into an image. The image must have so much ambiguity that it actually generates thoughts and ideas, and creates unexpected meanings. A prime example of one of these evocative motifs in his work is the envelope, an essentially everyday, relatively unimportant object. It is usually only the contents, the letter, that is of importance; the envelope is simply a protective wrapper that is seldom kept. But in the context of Van den Broeck's work, the envelope takes on a crucial significance as the carrier of a secret message. As the only clearly delineated form, it looms up like a phenomenon from another world out of a forest of lines, or it floats, perhaps surrounded by a halo, in a fluid, atmospheric landscape. The carrier, the 'cover', does not surrender its contents, the letter. The transformation of the envelope, with its overlapping flaps on the back, into a spatial object is obvious. Suddenly it can appear as an undefined, closed structure or as a box or a chest. Both conceal and cover.
As does another recurring motif in Van den Broeck's work, the mask. This sometimes looks more like a 'casing' of plating-armour, almost. It roughly traces the outline of a face, which seems frozen in the iron mask as if in rigor mortis. But the mask is not always such a gruesome apparition. It has a more cheerful counterpart, derived from the masks of the commedia dell'arte. Here, too, they represent on the one hand contradictory, on the other supplementary concepts like revelation and concealment. Much of Van den Broeck's work is concerned with hermetically sealed forms that stand or hang in front of something, or holes that open up a prospect of an infinite space.
'I can't help constantly seeing different things or seeing the same things differently, sometimes even years later,' says Van den Broeck. 'The number increases and shrinks again. Now there are the envelopes, which can be buildings or boxes at the same time. And sometimes an envelope is simply intended as a letter, but it can also, of course-very romantically?-be a missive.'
'I often only realize afterwards that my subjects are related to one another and how they are related. Anything, in fact, can grow into a theme, except that I never make real portraits. I do create imaginary portraits, like the ones of Julien Sorel, for instance. Or my series of Callas drawings.'(*)
Julien Sorel appears in one of the drawings as a tenuous, ghostly head and profile against a background of rather heavier, firmer lines. The title refers to the protagonist of Stendhal's 'Le Rouge et Le Noir', the opportunist Julien Sorel, hopelessly embroiled in his own ambitions. Van den Broeck's titles are never intended to be illustrative or explanatory; they stem from the intuitive making of connections that is the wellspring of the work as a whole.
However, they do throw light on his sources of inspiration. The literary quotes and concepts from the world of music that he often uses have an affinity. In their dialogue with the work, they are a continuation of the process of imagination. In that sense, what we have here is an imaginary portrait of Julien Sorel, which springs from Van den Broeck's aesthetic and emotional perception of Stendhal's novel. It is tempting to link Sorel's free-floating head in the drawing with the conclusion of the book, in which he is convicted of an attack on his former mistress, imprisoned, and ultimately beheaded.
But the head and the profile readily form other links, too. At another moment, Van den Broeck saw them as Maria Callas, perhaps while her voice was resounding through his studio. 'One of these drawings just happened to have that Callas profile. The title of the drawing is 'Donna chi sei'. Next to the profile of Sorel floats a stone, a meteorite. It is Callas, the star, a meteorite that has struck, a phenomenon, a human being as a force of nature.'(*)
It is not the only reference to Maria Callas in Van den Broeck's work. In one of the drawings, the envelope is shown against a background in which we can identify a photograph of the singer with a scarf over her head. This scarf then takes on a life of its own in the work. The boxes with their unknown contents floating in space are themselves concealed and covered by a dangling scarf, like a catafalque.
Van den Broeck makes his motifs so much his own that they in fact become 'empty', and he can erase their original meaning and context, so that they can be 'filled' in different ways again and again.

The head, always human in origin, has occupied an important place in his work. It is often present only as a starting point, as an open outline, which evokes constantly changing 'fillings' and transformations, and thus literally and figuratively offers a view into another world. The head, completely devoid of features or even references to them, acts as a window, as an image in an image. Although the constant metamorphoses develop out of the form, the head in the drawings can also be conceived of as a metaphor for the human brain, from which something new constantly springs. Sometimes the heads think or dream and a figure or a form appears above them, as if in a text bubble. A die, for instance, so that they appear to be referring with a degree of self-irony to the unpredictability of their own fate, of the course they have yet to follow in the drawings.
The openness and mutability of Van den Broeck's motifs are underscored by his practice of combining different individual drawings, usually heads, into a whole-into a 'block' of three, six or sometimes as many as sixteen drawings, so that various transformations occur in a single work. Different as they may be, the heads never deny their mutual relationship or common origin. Sometimes this is accentuated by the titles they are given, such as 'Brothers' for a series of brush drawings of heads in acrylic and water. 'Nine responsoria for Carlo Gesualdo, Principe di Venosa' is more complex. Don Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1560-1615) was a Neapolitan composer and lute player. The responsorium, derived from the Latin responsum (response), is a liturgical hymn for one or more soloists, preceded and followed by choral singing. Gesualdo composed several responsoria. In nine drawings Van den Broeck formulates as it were as many responses to Gesualdo and his music. There are no literal references here either, although the prominent cross and the ears are highly significant elements. In one of the heads, the ears take the place of the eyes, emphasizing the sense of hearing at the expense of sight. One can also make a connection between listening to music and conjuring up images.
However, one could argue with equal justification that the drawings have found no more than a fleeting impetus in Gesualdo, a first approximation, and that they are above all a response to one another.
This always inward-looking game of question and answer in Van den Broeck's work is played in great earnest but with a lightness of touch. The heads have meanwhile spawned a series of excited forms, which Van den Broeck described as the foils to the earlier, always rather forbidding masks. He calls these hard-to-define forms-hanging like lanterns from their never severed umbilical cords-'Cheerful Fruit'. Swathed in different distinct colours, they gradually change from heads into strange fruit, in which there sometimes suddenly appear, in a fluid movement, the outlines of an apple core; but this, in turn, swiftly transforms into a hollow skull. Van den Broeck's fruit does not grow on trees or bushes and is nurtured not by the rain and the sun's rays, but by the imagination.

Frank Van den Broeck's chameleon-like motifs do not allow exact identifications and rigid classifications. Aside from associated series, there are still forms and themes that flow into one another. When he says that his subjects can be kneaded, in the fist instance he means it literally. He approaches the lines and forms in his drawings as a sculptor approaches his wax or clay: as a malleable material that can in theory be modelled endlessly. The ceramic heads, the latest addition to the oeuvre, thus appear to arise logically out of his dealings with his material, whatever it may be. In the second place, there is a process that happens in the mind. The undefined, undecided character of the work is essential 'per destare l'ingegno' (to awaken the mind). Every line set down, every form that emerges, represents no more than a phase in the whole and leads on to other new ideas and transformations. The doing leads to the thinking and vice versa.
The process of transformation takes place in the image itself. The form moves forward of its own volition, without a prefabricated meaning. Content and form are expressly separated; in Van den Broeck's work form is not a metaphor, it is a self-sufficient discovery. The content is subjective and ambivalent, and is evoked by the self-formed image and vice versa. It would probably not be going too far to say that in this interaction the image and the artist are both subject and object at one and the same time.
Language is the third player in the game: image and title open the way to each other, but without trying to explain each other. The titles, in turn, generate new images.
The work of Frank Van den Broeck is a continuum of imagination that only reveals itself in full in the oeuvre as a whole or at least in a substantial part of it. This raises the question of the position of the individual works within it. In fact, they form a series of fleeting snapshots of an ongoing process. Van den Broeck has always shown an awareness of the importance of these successive moments, precisely because they are transitory. He usually dates his works carefully with the full date as well as the year, thus establishing their place in the oeuvre. At the same time, recording the date a work was created may help to preserve something of the mood of the moment, of what happened that day, what the weather was like, whether the work was going well or not. The sensitivity to a specific atmosphere, linked to specific times and situations, is also powerfully expressed in the photographs that Van den Broeck has been taking for years.
Photography, after all, is the ultimate medium for isolating and recording a fleeting moment. The photographs, never yet shown in public, are created more or less in parallel with the other work, but still have to find a place in the oeuvre-even for their creator himself.
The individual work relates to Frank Van den Broeck's oeuvre as the detail does to the whole. One could say that it zooms in on a specific moment or element. The word detail is derived from the Latin 'talea', which means twig or severed piece, something that is cut away from something larger. It thus has the meaning of 'small part', but also means 'particular aspect'. The detail-unlike the fragment-can evoke the richness and complexity of the whole. Each individual work, each line, each form and each colour plane retain the relationship with the process of creation and carry within it the existence of the ever forming and never completed whole.

(*)
The quoted words of Frank Van den Broeck are taken from: Pietje Tegenbosch, 'His profile & her profile or the forces of nature' Frank Van den Broeck. Tekeningen, pastels, aquarellen en schilderijen 1988-1991, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1991