Johan De Wilde. Hands of time

Since the mid-nineties, Johan De Wilde (°1964, BE) has been

making pencil drawings that can be considered as the work of

a ‘human printer’, like man created computers in his mind.

The artworks are meticulous built as paintings, layer after layer

of horizontal and vertical lines, with a suggestion of shapes or

numbers interwoven. De Wilde draws the canvas he paints on

and mostly uses the same formats: A6, A4, A2, because he wants

the drawings to be as universal as possible and these are the most

commonly used paper sizes in everyday life. In the periphery of

this, he also creates prints, photo series, graphic art, collages

and texts. His labour-intensive style is the antithesis to the fast

pace of life and the transience of our overly saturated digital

visual culture. The artist basically draws time, on a 1/1 scale, as

his own and everyone’s time goes by, an ironic remark on Ars

longa, vita brevis. This book depicts the mentioned drawing series

Pars Pro Toto, Requiem – The Long Goodbye (2017-2018), a series

remembering art historian Tanguy Eeckhout and published in

2019 in the book of the same name and the continuing series

Indoor Impressionismus. Also included is a never before published

poem by Gust Gils and a collaboration with musician Heleen Van

Haegenborgh on the subject of the infinitely continuable series

Pi – Fugue pour les survivants (2007-work in progress), part of the

collection of S.M.A.K., that began with the irrational number

pi and continues in a long series of numbers after the comma.