George De Decker

George De Decker deliberately chooses abstraction in his paintings. In this series of seventeen works, he works with Chinese rice paper, as well as oil paint and acrylic. Each ‘painting’ involves weaving paint and painted strips of these wafer-thin, transparent sheets. He experimented with surfaces and lines that disappear and reappear, until he finally reached a composition that finds its own balance and binds canvas and paper unto an inseparable whole. There is always an abundance of whites, only rarely does he let his prototypical blue take over.
When creating in his studio, the artist always listens carefully to specific music. During Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang (2020), he was led by the rhythm and melody of Thomas Adès' Totentanz.
For this series, the artist came across the ‘shadows of Hiroshima’ through the work of Amélie Nothomb and Marguerite Duras. These are imprints of bodies and objects burned by the atomic bomb. He shows that something beautiful can emerge from something terrible, as expressed in the line Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang from Rainer Maria Rilke’s elegy.

Belgium

Brussels

Husk Gallery

Painting

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang XI

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang XVI

When creating in his studio, George De Decker always listens carefully to specific music. During the painting series Pli selon pli (2016), he was led by the rhythm and melody of Pierre Boulez’s eponymous piece of music.
 
Boulez named his composition after a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, Remémoration d’amis belges, in which the poet describes how a mist that shrouds the city of Bruges gradually lifts:
 
‘Comme furtive d’elle et visible je sens
Que se dévêt pli selon pli la pierre veuve’
 
(As if by stealth and visible I sense
That fold by fold the widowed stone unrobes itself)
 
De Decker continually interweaves music and visual art into an interferential whole. He translates pieces of music and texts into an abstract visual language with an almost monochrome palette, in which he subtly reveals his sensitivity to layering and variations. The artist places layer after layer on top of each other, in this case Japanese tissue paper glued onto a painted canvas. The bottom layer of oil paint still plays a part and can be concealed or revealed, whether or not covered by Chinese porcelain powder.
 
Wit in wit – White in White, the 2019 poetic interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for piano and sound tape was composed by De Decker himself. The Pli selon pli series is a kind of substantive precedent for this. He then transposed the reduction to the essence and the search for endless variations of white in white tones into a score.


Pli selon pli v

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang VII

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang IIII

Pli selon pli iiii

Pli selon pli xiiii

Pli selon pli viii

George De Decker deliberately chooses abstraction in his paintings.  In this series, he works with Chinese rice paper, as well as oil paint and acrylic. Each ‘painting’ involves weaving paint and painted strips of these wafer-thin, transparent sheets. He experimented with surfaces and lines that disappear and reappear, until he finally reached a composition that finds its own balance and binds canvas and paper unto an inseparable whole. There is always an abundance of whites, only rarely does he let his prototypical blue take over. 

When creating in his studio, the artist always listens carefully to specific music. During 'Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang' (2020), he was led by the rhythm and melody of Thomas Adès' Totentanz.

For this series, the artist came across the ‘shadows of Hiroshima’ through the work of Amélie Nothomb and Marguerite Duras. These are imprints of bodies and objects burned by the atomic bomb. He shows that something beautiful can emerge from something terrible, as expressed in the line 'Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang' from Rainer Maria Rilke’s elegy.

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang II

When creating in his studio, George De Decker always listens carefully to specific music. During the painting series Pli selon pli (2016), he was led by the rhythm and melody of Pierre Boulez’s eponymous piece of music.
 
Boulez named his composition after a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, Remémoration d’amis belges, in which the poet describes how a mist that shrouds the city of Bruges gradually lifts:
 
‘Comme furtive d’elle et visible je sens
Que se dévêt pli selon pli la pierre veuve’ 
(As if by stealth and visible I sense
That fold by fold the widowed stone unrobes itself)
 
De Decker continually interweaves music and visual art into an interferential whole. He translates pieces of music and texts into an abstract visual language with an almost monochrome palette, in which he subtly reveals his sensitivity to layering and variations. The artist places layer after layer on top of each other, in this case Japanese tissue paper glued onto a painted canvas. The bottom layer of oil paint still plays a part and can be concealed or revealed, whether or not covered by Chinese porcelain powder.
 
Wit in wit – White in White, the 2019 poetic interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for piano and sound tape was composed by De Decker himself. The Pli selon pli series is a kind of substantive precedent for this. He then transposed the reduction to the essence and the search for endless variations of white in white tones into a score.


Pli selon pli ii

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang VIII

Pli selon pli

Pli selon pli xiii

Pli selon pli vi

When creating in his studio, George De Decker always listens carefully to specific music. During the painting series Pli selon pli (2016), he was led by the rhythm and melody of Pierre Boulez’s eponymous piece of music.
Boulez named his composition after a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, Remémoration d’amis belges, in which the poet describes how a mist that shrouds the city of Bruges gradually lifts:
‘Comme furtive d’elle et visible je sens
Que se dévêt pli selon pli la pierre veuve’
(As if by stealth and visible I sense
That fold by fold the widowed stone unrobes itself)
De Decker continually interweaves music and visual art into an interferential whole. He translates pieces of music and texts into an abstract visual language with an almost monochrome palette, in which he subtly reveals his sensitivity to layering and variations. The artist places layer after layer on top of each other, in this case Japanese tissue paper glued onto a painted canvas. The bottom layer of oil paint still plays a part and can be concealed or revealed, whether or not covered by Chinese porcelain powder.
Wit in wit – White in White, the 2019 poetic interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for piano and sound tape was composed by De Decker himself. The Pli selon pli series is a kind of substantive precedent for this. He then transposed the reduction to the essence and the search for endless variations of white in white tones into a score.

Pli selon pli iii

Pli selon pli i

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang VI

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als den Schrecklichen Anfang I

Husk Gallery is delighted to present ‘Pli selon pli’, the first exhibition with George De Decker featuring two painting series accompanied by his own recent music composition ‘Wit in wit, Goldberg Variations Revisited’. 
Both painter and music composer George De Decker is a versatile artist. Music as a mosaic of sound and text inspires the artist to create images of 'silent noise' on canvas. De Decker constantly listens to music during the creation of a new series of paintings. In 2020 the artist worked intensely on 17 paintings of ‘Das Schöne is nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang’ with music by Thomas Adès on endless repeat. This new series is presented along with artworks from his preceding series ‘Pli selon pli’, created in 2016 while listening to Pierre Boulez. The literary titles of both series – each quoting a line by Rilke and Mallarmé – were selected with the greatest subtlety, and reveal his high sensitivity for poetry and literature. The music pieces and related texts are translated into abstract imagery with a rather monochrome palette that highlights his feel for multiple layers.

Pli selon pli

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