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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.

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