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Marco Meneguzzo
A QUIET NECESSITY
The house is small, ‘typical’, with the roof extending almost to the ground. At the back of the house, what was once a shelter for animals and small agricultural tools has become a studio ; the surrounding garden could be called a vegetable plot. A goose is a white speck in the grey/ green /brown of the flat horizon. This is where Raphaël Buedts lived and worked. There are clues, peculiar to the farming tradition of Flanders (the western side is so different from the east ern, they tell me), that reveal the presence of ‘things’ that are only apparently functional within the system of objects of common use : two truncated tree trunks drawn together – one horizontal, the other vertical – on which a wooden tablet vaguely marked with a white line balances semi-precariously on top of a small wedge. It does not resemble any known object, even though it
blends perfectly into its calm and ‘anthropised’ sur roundings. For Raf Buedts, it was a ‘place for drawing’, a practicable sculpture : You can sit on the horizontal trunk and draw on the tablet, while not far away a horizon accentuated by an avenue of trees alongside a canal provides a dividing line between sky and earth. Yet, in this calm stability of a subdued and unhostile landscape, everything is unstable, subtly unstable. Raf Buedts’ works speak to us about this unpercei vable instability of the soul, using one of the few expe dients that art concedes when one wants to express a feeling or a state of being : analogy (the other possibility, used and abused in the past, would be allegory, meaning a codified symbolisation – such as representing a lion to imply strength – but this appears terribly obsolete, or, at best, as in modernity, as ‘citationalist’). All his sculp tures are unstable, or better, subtly unstable : a wedge that unbalances the entire wooden construction ; an easel that could not stand up without an approximately nailed joint ; a balance of wooden objects, precarious to the point that it seems likely to fall to the ground at the passage of a sparrow. This is the analogy I mentioned earlier : in order to speak of instability, one is shown instability.
Schaduw [Shadow], 2004 Esdoorn, potlood, houtskool / Maple, pencil, charcoal, 101 cm (h) Privécollectie / Private collection p. 249 : z.t. [Untitled], 2009 Krijt en acryl op papier / Chalk and acrylic on paper, 50 x 21 cm Privécollectie / Private collection
z.t. [Untitled], 1980 -1989 Potlood op papier / Pencil on paper, 21 x 29,7 cm Collectie / Collection Roland Jooris