Nocturnal Brain
Frank Van den Broeck
drawings, pastels, sculptures, tapestries
4 April – 3 May 2009
Frank Van den Broeck’s (1950) drawings have an unmistakable handwriting. In lively lines he draws concrete and yet ambiguous representations. In a pastel drawing, for instance, two wedge-shaped windows are floating in a stormy sky, which seem to offer a passage to a different space. Below, rectangular forms are sinking into a rippling pool. Floating often recurs in Van den Broeck’s work, so that objects appear to be in a state of transition, on their way to another place or dimension. A similar sense of change is to be seen in an undefined form of a cloud in which a face appears to be visible.
In the sculptures shown in the exhibition such a state of transition is expressed in a plastic manner. Heads with grotesque features are emerging from the clay, without being explicit, the face shows itself but cannot be caught. In this way Frank Van den Broeck seems to aim at the moment of creation itself, the aspiration to make visible what is potentially present.
Drawings, pastels and ceramic sculptures are to be seen in the exhibition, and in addition tapestries woven in the Textielmuseum Tilburg, where the drawings have been transferred to tapestries woven in the jacquard technique.