George De Decker

George De Decker deliberately chooses abstraction in his paintings. In this series of seventeen works, he works with Chinese rice paper, as well as oil paint and acrylic. Each ‘painting’ involves weaving paint and painted strips of these wafer-thin, transparent sheets. He experimented with surfaces and lines that disappear and reappear, until he finally reached a composition that finds its own balance and binds canvas and paper unto an inseparable whole. There is always an abundance of whites, only rarely does he let his prototypical blue take over.

When creating in his studio, the artist always listens carefully to specific music. During Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang (2020), he was led by the rhythm and melody of Thomas Adès' Totentanz.

For this series, the artist came across the ‘shadows of Hiroshima’ through the work of Amélie Nothomb and Marguerite Duras. These are imprints of bodies and objects burned by the atomic bomb. He shows that something beautiful can emerge from something terrible, as expressed in the line Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang from Rainer Maria Rilke’s elegy.