Johan De Wilde. Hands of time

Since the mid-nineties, Johan De Wilde (°1964, BE) has been making pencil drawings that can be considered as the work of a ‘human printer’, like man created computers in his mind. The artworks are meticulous built as paintings, layer after layer of horizontal and vertical lines, with a suggestion of shapes or numbers interwoven. De Wilde draws the canvas he paints on and mostly uses the same formats: A6, A4, A2, because he wants the drawings to be as universal as possible and these are the most commonly used paper sizes in everyday life. In the periphery of this, he also creates prints, photo series, graphic art, collages and texts. His labour-intensive style is the antithesis to the fast pace of life and the transience of our overly saturated digital visual culture. The artist basically draws time, on a 1/1 scale, as his own and everyone’s time goes by, an ironic remark on Ars longa, vita brevis. This book depicts the mentioned drawing series Pars Pro Toto, Requiem – The Long Goodbye (2017-2018), a series remembering art historian Tanguy Eeckhout and published in 2019 in the book of the same name and the continuing series Indoor Impressionismus. Also included is a never before published poem by Gust Gils and a collaboration with musician Heleen Van Haegenborgh on the subject of the infinitely continuable series Pi – Fugue pour les survivants (2007-work in progress), part of the collection of S.M.A.K., that began with the irrational number pi and continues in a long series of numbers after the comma.