Is a gap the opposite of a hole? When we consider a hole, the void, the core, the nothingness, and the emptiness – still assuming the gap might be its opposite – is the gap the place where light shines through? But whereas there might be only one hole, which stands for all the holes existing, a gap is something in between the things. A gap is something that connects, though vague. A gap is something that gives rhythm, is it repeated. It’s flickering. To embody the gap and its repetition in the exhibition, several radiators are depicted in paintings. These works are called Radiator Pieces. A title, that is carried over to other, sculptural works in the show. Even though this choice is made to emphasise a connection of sense over several media - here sculpture and painting - you might consider an agglomeration under the same title a piece of manual or a form of guidance for something that can be easily repeated at home.

It may be useful to remember, however, that a gap can also be a cut, a gaping wound. Something difficult to trust. A gap can be dangerous if we underestimate its distance. And if we do, we fall, into the brightest of holes.

Multiplication was what it started with. I guess in the arts we would not really use this term to describe similar works, although there is the multiple, but rather use the word series. In my practice, I was barely touching upon this field in the sense of a congruent, timely bound body of work, connected through its topic, form, and making. But what even is a series nowadays? Driven by technical inventions, such as printmaking, and fuelled by the mechanisation of production and society, the idea of a series is inherent to modernist inventions. Today, this might be different, though still present in other forms. But if we look at multiplications or a series, we’re also looking at the thing in between. This led me, in a very pictorial sense, to the idea of the gap. Whereas the thing multiplied, the subset of the series is something that nowadays leads to a certain emptiness (the subject = the product it consumes, the hole, the void); the gap is something that radiates (the light that shines through). It is flickering: if we look at faster and faster production lines, inventions reaching the doorstep in no time (the brightest of holes), but it also has the potential to be slowed down. Slowing down might not be the right word, since it still oscillates between notions of acceleration and laziness. For the lack of a better word, I’m using the term ”proximity’ here, not because it necessarily means closeness. But this might not be so bad in the end, since it highlights something different, the gap as something that has a potentiality to be overcome, without it vanishing, nor being neglected.

Painting tends to lean towards the hole. This hole is not necessarily represented in being a round dark spot “piercing” the surface, but can take the form of a vanishing point (historically a central perspective, where everything is falling into each other), or spots of unpainted canvas (more recent, as spots where the artist’s gesture is not present). Since the gap is something with a much bigger affiliation to time (especially when it is repeated), it seems trickier to represent that in painting. A thought I’m having atm: Is the impressionistic brushstroke not only linked to spots of light but also a recording of time in the image? Nevertheless, by using the radiators, I’ve tried to find a form and representation that might bridge this, that is, at the same time, a stand-in for the gap and the gap in painting.

These works are titled Radiator Pieces; this is a reference to Jo Baer’s famous, low-hanging Radiator Paintings from the early 70s (I have found no clue that Jo Baer used this descriptive name herself; someone must have brought it up, and it stuck for obvious reasons). A series of very elongated canvases with an almost sculptural depth of 10 cm. As with her earlier works, the front surface is scarcely painted, a whitish center is accentuated by a darker frame that extends to the sides of the stretcher as well. But unlike her works from the 60s, where the frame is black in combination with a colour and most of the time rectangular, these works are much more playful, irregular, composed, more decorative if you want.They are a kind of culmination in her work, maybe the quintessence of abstract painting. The works that follow them are no longer abstract but involve images, something Jo Baer will later call “Radical Figuration.”

Of course, it is of the highest grade of naiveté to associate works, paintings that depict actual radiators, with abstract paintings of the 70s, which someone named Radiator Paintings, because of their size and installation. There is, though, something that might link this odd pairing. Isn’t a radiator an object of great peculiarity: A box, with an obvious front, full and hollow at the same time, structured by gaps. We look inside the radiator or at its surface, depending on where we stand. In a 1974 interview Jo Baer says: “…I have always been interested by that ambiguity, but only in the last few years have I deliberately intended to have my viewers move around the canvases. Once again our bourgeois system of values insists on the centrality of the object. We have the time and the luxury to sit down and contemplate it, but there are multiple visual systems. The type of system one uses when remaining still implies a fixation, a concentration, that is different from what one gets when one is displaced.”

Ancient Roman sarcophagi of the late period were often adorned with highly elaborated reliefs. Depictions of Dionysian feasts, paradisiacal scenes on the open water, war, and stories of goddesses and heroes were among the most popular. These images materialised as carved in stone reliefs only on one long side of the sarcophagi. This is due to their arrangement in the death houses. Shelf-like structures on the walls supported the sarcophagi, leaving only one side visible. Although not underground, the inside of these houses was quite dark. Visitors – and visiting the dead was quite a common thing in ancient Rome – had to carry candles or oil lamps when being inside. One theory why the reliefs are made the way they are is that, by passing along them with their flickering lamps, visitors animated the depictions through this moving light source, which was reflected by convex sculptural forms and sucked up by cavities and indentations.