Les élégies (lament) – 哀歌
Fragments – [ the outer room of silence #1 ] – 2000
A silent melody, forgotten for too long, a lone saxophone facing a wide open space, echoes out of the distance. Fragments of memories flare up, raindrops in a clear summernight. Wandering through seemingly undefined spaces, going somewhere, over there. Wandering…, puzzling the lost pieces together.
Images are bursting out of images. There are the images. There are the images within the images, fragments of images escaping out of the past. Fragments upon which images are build. Fragments of memories, strings of snapshots closely knit together, streams of images in an image. Fields. Space Tensions. Anxiety. Anger. Madness. Strings are pulled up, up, up, to a (impossible ?) breaking point.
The images are not snapshots of past events, but reconstructions of stories, an collection of flashbacks within an image. Invisible realities, silence and uneasiness (anxiety), are building the images. And the stories are told with light and dimness.
“Fragments” is a labyrinth of images through which the artist, or the spectator, moves back and forth, discovering, opening spaces deeper under the emptiness of the theatre of reality. The images here presented explore, in their abstract poetry, the silence of the limits of dreams: the frontiers of a huge expanse of water submerging the end of a road, but also all the expectations of a long night. And questioning the dreams.
Light playing shadows, an object reflected upon a distant melody, images mirroring each other in a rainbow of grey shades. The stroke of a brush or a sponge add a finishing touch on a detail here, a shadow there. A few dried flowers, a seemingly smooth surroundings, but, then, behind an image, a torment appears, an anxiety that also is a fascination – as yet unknown.
Philippe Wittenbergh, july 2000