2017 0118 text in Tom Hunt in Philippe Vandenberg, red hours en ger [m fi 2288]

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Tom Hunt

Philippe Vandenberg, Red Hours

The title, Red Hours, which is taken from Georg Trakl’s poem Stormy Evening, refers to a period of particular intensity, an isolated and heightened passage among the fields and furrows of life. While Philippe Vandenberg’s drawing practice was habitual to the extent of being diaristic, it was undertaken as a necessary endeavour over countless hours. In various ways, the drawings on display in Wolfsberg show Vandenberg to have been an artist in search of authentic expression. He worked away at the human condition like it was a scab that he couldn’t stop picking, and his drawings, for all their ecstatic lucidity, approach the sublime.

Vandenberg was a complex and profound Belgian artist who made some

20,000 works on paper during his lifetime. Red Hours features around sixty of these, all dated between 1995 and 2009. The leitmotiv is the colour red, which features prom­inently and decisively in every drawing. It gives the works their pitch, be it anger or sorrow, agitation or introversion, clarity or confusion. In drawings of labyrinths inscribed by swastika-shaped dead-ends and in a ring of four portraits of the same woman clenching a serpent between her teeth, and from a rowing boat awaiting its passenger to a king resting in a hammock surrounded by un­d ulating paths and doorways, red functions as an undertow to the sym­bolism – a reminder of our own physicality and the heat of emotion.

Vandenberg made it difficult to ignore the terrible imagery of his art. The

­v iolence that his subjects suffer is emphasised by the correlative brutality of the mark-­m aking. Likewise, the artist’s style and technique heightens the potency of the scrawled, baleful phrases in his work and the doleful expressions that he captures in his self-portraits.

It is the idea of ‘style’ that Red Hours aims to address. The concept has long

been an under-appreciated element of his practice, all too easily overlooked in pursuit of an overtly biographical reading of the oeuvre. While the explicit content of many of the drawings is enough to detain viewers (or perhaps scare them off), it is how these themes, motifs and narratives are treated that holds one’s attention.

Vandenberg’s draughtsmanship is deliberately naive yet extraordinarily pre-

cise. His children recall the distinctive angle at which he would hold a brush or pencil between the tips of his fingers. Rather than cradle his implement at an

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2017 0118 text in Tom Hunt in Philippe Vandenberg, red hours en ger [m fi 2288] by LIGHTMACHINE agency - Issuu