A major misunderstanding about what I do is to think it’s expressionist, when it’s completely the other way around. On one hand, there ain’t an iota of self-expression or any ‘personal point of view’ involved in my process and the faith with which I hold painting as a natural phenomenon; and on the other, my stuff is so saturated, filled up like a Jordaens or a Mondrian in the Flemish tradition, that it neutralises itself. An important word for me is ‘Equidistance’ - meaning that all that’s there is equally weighted and densified, levelled on the same plane without perspective or any hierarchy, like a flat egg or something, both centrifugal and centripetal. From this point of view, I thus indeed consider them as monochrome equivalents, upturned repulsed ones, or as the back of a tapestry with all the threads mangled the Odradek way. One other word that seems practical at describing what I make is ‘apocalyptical’. The Apocalypse being a recapitulation, it makes my day.
One last thing, so to speak: there ain’t no proper afterlife in Judaism, instead there’s the Sheol. It is said to be the ‘mains sewage drainage’, the ‘gutter way to heaven’, the cess pit of humankind - where everyone ends up, whether you’ve been a holy man or some nasty motherfucker. The trick is we all get there, neither heaven nor hell, but in complete oblivion of our own identity, waiting to turn back into nothing all over again. So of course, the Sheol’s tonality is grey, but the negative grey of lack of qualities. This negative Sheol grey is the haunting charter to which I oppose the average mean of the full positive grey, the motley carnivalesque apocalyptical one of the upturned monochrome. Let’s say, for our scholarly readers: the Colour Out of Space.