Double Trouble

Galerie Greta Meert is delighted to present Pieter Vermeersch’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Under the title Double Trouble, the artist brings together a restrained series of recent works on marble, in which he once again questions his characteristic gradations. What unfolds on these surfaces is not a demonstration of technique, but an exploration of what painting can be when it withdraws from the rhetoric of the image and connects with a surface that is, in itself, already, image.

The title points to a duality that forms the focus of the exhibition. Two orders of imagery meet on a single surface: the mineralogical image that the earth has slowly inscribed, and the pictorial image that the artist introduces onto it. The relationship between the two is never fixed; one can become the other, and is both at the same time. Here, abstraction is the material itself, the stone that serves as a motif, and it can just as easily come to the fore whilst the painting recedes into the background. This shift does not occur linearly, but in an unpredictable rhythm in which the gaze must recalibrate time and again.

What is painted thus becomes abstraction, and the material, the stone, the support, becomes a form of figuration with an almost photographic character. Veins, stains and fault lines form a composition that no one has devised, and yet the eye reads them as a found image. Herein lies the core of a clearly present ambiguity: a symbiosis that the artist strives for but which, in full awareness, carries within it an impossibility. It is precisely this impossibility that is not a shortcoming, but the silent driving force of the act of looking.

The smaller formats in the exhibition lend this interplay a particular intimacy. Whereas the larger works envelop the viewer, these canvases invite us closer: the eye seeks to draw near the surface, to discern how one hue merges into another, how the stone beneath the painting breathes. 

These works exude an unmistakably phenomenological character, in which individual experience is strongly acknowledged. It is not what the image represents that is decisive, but how it unfolds in the time of contemplation. The intentionality here is directed towards both the painterly and the material, and it is precisely this dual orientation that sets everything in motion. 

At one moment the pigment is the focus of attention; the next, the mineral structure comes to the fore; sometimes the two appear simultaneously, sometimes they supplant one another. Thus an ever-changing focus emerges, a constant energy that never settles within a single reading.

It is here that the title acquires its second layer. What is presented to the viewer is not a representation to be read, but, to borrow a concept from Walter Benjamin, die Schwelle. Benjamin explicitly distinguishes the Schwelle from the Grenze: whereas the boundary separates and immediately effects a transition, the threshold is a zone with its own duration, in which one can linger. Whoever crosses a border is already on the other side; whoever steps onto a threshold remains in both worlds simultaneously for a time.

That distinction is decisive for these works. The marble and the pigment do not form a boundary between matter and painting, but a zone in which both registers continue to operate at once. The viewer need not choose; they are invited to linger in the in-between space, where identification is suspended and perception itself acquires a duration. 

Thus Double Trouble opens up a terrain to inhabit. The brief interval in which a colour, as it fades, and a stone, as it becomes a sculpture, clear a space that can only be filled by looking.