Most of Xavier Verhoest’s works are made of photographs which are the starting point for further interventions. The pictures undergo different manipulations with painterly means and graphic techniques.
In these, he focuses on natural elements, surfaces and spatial situations, using images that are difficult to locate or to relate to a specific context in time and space.
The structure of the work is often very simple, maintaining often a clear division between lower and upper sections. Surfaces are worked layer upon layer. Sometimes we find words or excerpts from poems he has read ( a o Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Paul Celan, Yves Bonnefoy ).
These elusive pictures say something about his search for an internal quietude perhaps, or a reaction to the inevitability of nature’s triumph and his belief that today’s world and system has forced us to act irresponsibly ecologically and politically.

A suitable distance
His search has often been for the distance necessary to approach the subject of an image which has its origins in his own experience and which would otherwise have been too close: his personal journey in Palestine, in war zones, in Kenya, has forced him to create a displacement, geographically and emotionally. He is not attached to a given, historical place in romantic fashion, rather he constructs places by mean of his work.
“There is a shift between what is real, remembered or imagined, of going beyond the specifics of place and time. Despite the pain and loss, all this creates fertile territory for me”

Breaking the perspective
Are these in fact images of a real East Africa, the place where he lives? He collects images that specify the territory without specifying the place. Their primary appearance brings to mind a deposit, rather than a representation: they are more formations than forms, keeping the fluidity and the solidity, between fragility and strength, between quietude and inquietude. He wants them to be images of an imaginary place, a place that goes well beyond the present impression.  He paints in order to return to origins, not a mystical place, just a place that has been in his world for a long time: call it time, memory, an idea of ruins. What is cannot remain.

“I search for incidental changes, a process which increases the initial value of the photograph, and which alters the apparent significance of the original perspective”

“The focus for most of these landscapes of the mind are without definite aim until I discern some compelling form in the background, from an unknown to the perception of a formed imaged, discovered, known, experienced. It is the time between the photographic moment and its transformation that matters to me, it is this dual impulse in which the friction between the two not only coexists but is productive for me”.

 

Xavier Verhoest’s work

by Dale Webster, ex lecturer in Art History, Kirklees College, UK

The first of Xavier Verhoest’s images that I encountered were in a small exhibition space in Nairobi. They were large pictures which seemed to resist the confinement of the gallery space and expand into a picture space which was both figurative and abstract, the figurative elements providing access into to a deep internal space dominated by blues and grays, a sort of atmospheric perspective of the mind. One in particular suggested an open sea stretching to a distant horizon crossed by breaking waves, but strangely, this “seascape” did not present openness and vastness, the usual characteristic of such a construction, but rather enclosure and containment. It is this apparent visual contradiction which is a theme running through much of his recent work, a theme which is at once unsettling and quite beautiful at the same time.

Xavier Verhoest is a Belgian artist working in Nairobi, Kenya. He has exhibited frequently in Kenya, and internationally both in Africa and Europe. Xavier was born in R D Congo where he lived with his family until moving to Europe to study Cinematography, the influence of which can still be seen in his work. For many years his “day job” centered on the plight of displaced persons, initially with Medecins Sans Frontieres, working in central Africa and Palestine.  More recently through his own project, Art2Be, he  uses the process of body mapping as creative and therapeutic tool for those affected by HIV, domestic violence, and sexual orientation. It’s this encounter with the horror of social and personal displacement which resonates in Xavier’s imagery.

It’s not easy to write about Xavier’s work and the layers of visual metaphor. If it were, I guess the images would be redundant. They certainly have an initial visual impact, and this belies the intricacies of small detail and thoughts, often expressed in written phrases which weave from the surface, where they should be, into and around elements in the picture space, sometimes fading as if rubbed out by the weather they encounter. Thought integrated into the fabric of the picture. And the thoughts, the metaphors, seem consistently to focus on our inability to break free, from oppressors, taboos, clans, and in the end ourselves. Hence the contradiction in the painting of the wave. It originates in Gaza and a people contained, where the sea seems to offer an escape, but in reality it is of course another barrier, a further constraint. The metaphors expand. It’s as if we are led by these small details of tree or petal or stem, always natural elements, into a Rothcoesque internal space which by its very incoherence is quite repellent. There is no peace here. This is not a safe place. It is the place of the dispossessed and the displaced of the world.

In his most recent work these same ideas have been transposed into three-dimensional objects, sculptured forms, which whilst losing the abstract imaginary space of two dimensions, are made concrete in forms suggestive of a helmet, a miniature prison room or a faceless head set into the ground of a white cubic cage. One feels that these objects express something much more personal, much closer to the artists own experience of displacement. Through the very intimacy of these solid forms we are presented with the idea of a personal and cultural alienation from a world falling apart, a world in which he has spent his working life helping to reconstruct.

So, we have in these strangely sterile personal objects and apparently benign and beautiful images of sky, sea, flowers and trees, a powerful reflection on the nature of the human condition in its social, political and personal manifestation, and we are left with the contradictions with which we started, and which are at the very heart of the matter. The truth in Xavier Verhoest ’s work, the final extension of the visual metaphor, is that we cannot but be a part of, and yet we are of course, all of us, displaced.