WOUTLAND - Antoon Van den Braembussche
On the occasion of "9x9", a project by WOUT & SARA BOMANS
Woutland can be found in the A5 sketchbook Sara Bomans gave to her nine-year-old brother as a birthday present. For a year, he set himself to making sketches and drawings, creating a universe entirely of his own. In Woutland, we are confronted with a wonderful mixture of organic and mechanical forms and shapes, including snakes, intestines, double faces, bodiless limbs, kites, flying saucers, tentacles, faces, tanks, masks and so on. It is a world full of hybrid creatures, scattered about in indefinite space. The young artist is obviously brimming with talent, which eventually inspired Sara Bomans to select 9 drawings as models for her characteristic hair-drawings. As an experiment. As an homage to Wout. To Woutland.
Hair-drawings are an important facet of Sara Bomans’s visual works. Through an almost unique process, she creates these drawings by first using a pin to make tiny little holes in the paper and subsequently sewing human hairs through the holes. In this technique she has acquired a truly enviable and virtually unrivalled mastery. The meticulously precise drawings tend to invoke images that approach the sublime. The images seem to appear and disappear at once. They are both tangible and rarefied, absent and present. At the same time, this is what gives them a somewhat elusive quality.
The original drawings have not so much been converted or transformed into hair-drawings as incorporated into works of superposition, creating an intermediate space, an area of tension between the contagious spontaneity of the child’s drawings and the elaborate, assiduous, almost monk-like discipline of the hair-drawings. It is also a tension between free association and laborious and patient mimesis. The space between pencil lines and hairs is filled with genuine suspense, which at the same time points to the impossibility of perfect imitation or copying. It is this aspect that gives the drawings their dual character and identity, their infinite double face, casting a lasting spell over the spectators. What is left sizzling on the retina is the lingering ethereal image of the unreal family likeness between the original child’s drawing and the delicate silhouette of the hairs' shadows fanning out along its lines.
The double identity raises questions about the character and authenticity of the artwork. Where does it begin? The moment Wout starts drawing? Or does his work require the interventions of his elder sister-artist to acquire the aura of art and become a part of the world of art? Is it possible to acknowledge a child’s drawing as a work of art without the need for legitimation by the artist, the art critic, the institution of art? How and to what extent does Sara's art change thanks to and through the symbiosis with her younger brother's drawings? Maybe it is the child’s drawings that truly originated the project, which would point above all to the enormous effects a child’s drawing may have as a found object, an objet trouvé.
The dual identity has been given an additional dimension in a splendid edition containing 18 serigraphs created through direct exposure of both sides of the 9 hair-drawings. Because the two prints of each pair mirror each other, the process of disentanglement is further reinforced. At the same time, they represent a playful reference to imitation and subsequent sewing work. Whereas the serigraphed front sides hardly reveal the extremely thin-lined hair-drawings at all, so that the resulting image looks like a near-perfect imitation of the original child’s drawing, the prints of the reverse sides break this optical illusion and confront us unmistakably with Sara's geometric and abstract hand and hair work. It is not until we observe the silk screens, that we recognise how the desire for unity and the dual identity are one and the same in the project.
Antoon Van den Braembussche
Author of Thinking Art