diaporama

Edith Dekyndt

Born in 1960 in Ypres (BE). Lives and works in Tournai (BE)

  

A is hotter than B

2005
Video colour, no sound
duration: 9'
Purchased in: 2008

Have you noticed the artist’s appetency for titles mimetically playing on so-called scientific objectivity? It is very interesting to observe the way Edith Dekyndt formalizes her references to the physical world. A is hotter than B (2005) is a video showing the dissolution of a drop of ink captured in an ice-cube which disintegrates between the artist’s fingers. While the rigorous title assumes the status of a mathematical formula, it contrasts with the majesty of the ample, harmonious movement of the colored liquid. The arabesque lines are a function of water temperature: when it’s cold, ink spreads sluggishly, maintaining a compact form, but as the water warms up, ink diffuses more rapidly. As our gaze follows the turns and twirls of the spiraling forms that appear to be the simplest expression of chiaroscuro, the shape attains its denouement in its dissolution. Astonished by so much beauty, our eye loses itself among the details of the sensuous curves, while our attention subsides as if distracted and magnetized by the majesty of the movement. Obeying a dynamic embodied in turns by laboratory practices of evasion and observation, the work thrives on the attentive gaze directed toward the physical world. The climax lies on the side of the Stimmung—a German concept studied by numerous disciplines (philosophy, esthetics, literature), which could be summed up as an expression of harmonious unity and a sensation of plenitude experienced in front of a landscape, so potent as to engender a desire to be absorbed in that landscape, to become the landscape.

Edith Dekyndt craves changes in the states of matter, luminous irisation, ballets of dust, or yet fluid or aerial movements. She shows the marvelous concealed in the laws of physics without mathematical or Cartesian demonstration, but rather by giving free rein to individual curiosity. In Dekyndt’s work, the displacement responding to the motions of the liquid or of air is always a movement-generating figure. Just as François Mauriac who observed that “dust is not quite nothing,” Edith Dekyndt elaborates the perception of reality of a world in perpetual motion. The desire for mobility also brings about the changes in states (liquid/solid – visible/invisible) by relying on the immediacy of the sensible qualities even while revealing them.

In her thirst for experimentation, Edith Dekyndt proposes situations capable of capturing the intuition of the instant. To experience the work is to accept a state of temporal suspension which allows for the interiorization of emotion and brings inner calm. As we approach the work, all feelings of anxiety appear inadequate; the work soothes and regenerates, like musical silence distanced from the hubbub of the frenzied city. Opening onto a feeling of serenity which enables its comprehension, the work overwhelms and cuts short any feeling of confusion or discomfort.

^{Cécilia Bezzan}

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