Texts by Sofie Van Loo
Gynaika-Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (Antwerp Arts Museum )"

'wholeness starts inbetween' ('Heelheid ontstaat tussenin')
Some works by Peter Buggenhout and Christophe Denys

* The hallmark of contemporary experience is an absence of inbetweenness. No third thing mediates between the immediacy of the current event and its antecedent 1

The recent three-dimensional dust-landscapes of Peter Buggenhout witness a radical ambiguity and, in doing so, is the realization of an in-between-space. They surpass the position of being the opposite compared to a culture. Paraphrasing Le visible et l'invisible of Maurice Merleau-Ponty2 : they are visible and invisible, not to be understood as each other's opposites, but rather as changing connections of a changing limit which forms the sculpture. That which is invisible, is the shadow of what you see. It makes no sense to try and make visible the indiscernible because it is not understandable. It sits behind the visible; it sticks to the sculpture and feeds it. One cannot approach this invisible as if it were an area still to be exploited. The invisible does not hold the power to appear. Since the invisible cannot be showed or described in words, one cannot engage in it. One cannot look it straight in the eyes. In a culture where the notion of trinity has almost entirely disappeared, it is strange and fascinating to find that there are still artists who manage to create an in-between-zone in their work. The work of Peter Buggenhout is an in-between-space. This probably means that the artist disposes of a 'proustian over-sensitivity' which enables him to create, starting from the limits of a canon, as an analogy on an organic process. Therefore, the work should, independently from the artist, possess a certain tension and intensity in order to metaphorically touch the onlooker with the fundamentally impalpable. Peter Buggenhout's work takes form at this level. He frees in his work that which one cannot touch in a statue. The invisible is woven into it and 'it' frees itself from it. His work is not (only) abject; it has one more dimension to it.

1.Barbara Maria Stafford, Consciousness as the art of connecting, The Mit Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Londen, 1999: p. 10: Barbara Maria Stafford elaborates, in several essays about art, on the resemblance with the 'different' and on where, through analogy, could exist a link between the visible and the invisible.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, Gallimard, 1964.

Peter Buggenhout's grottoe-landscapes, made from compressed stardust

Peter Buggenhout created some works with dust. One day, while cleaning his studio, he starded to collect the dust in his work space. He compresses the dust and pulls it apart again and makes the artwork emerge almost as if by itself. Out of the compressed and expanding dust emerge tunnels, grottoes, openings, filled up spaces, holes and hill-like structures. It are fragile dust-landscapes or dust still lifes which seem to have hardened by coincidence and just for a short while. The vulnerable aspect of the dust seems hardened and the fragile aspect seems opened up. If one could catch strings of smoke representing years of breathing in and out and if one could harden this smoke, the resulting ant-nest-like moonlandscape sculpture would be the witness of this years-long process. The origin, as an object stripped of all rubbish, does not exist. It is exactly the rubbish which forms the origin. And this origin is being realized, times over, through processes of development and regression. The dust landscape is a hardened, yet fragile 'Holy Spirit'. It is as if the loading work of a vortex preceded, sucked the dust out of the space and energetically spat out the seperated and recompressed dust particles. The onset of the universe, of our solar system and galaxy started from dust particles which found each other. Comets and exploding stars cause dust hazes. Stardust dissapears in black, revolving holes which become spiral tunnels and the stardust is expulsed, as if exhaled, in new combinations. Planets and stars emerge from compressed dust particles. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the dust, visible in a living room, was considered, at the same level as darkness and skin, as gates connecting the visible and the invisible world3. People believed that the dust on the floor, in the corners and on the ceiling offered an entry to the invisible world. Dust could be considered as the analogy of the invisible world. It was also regarded as the materialized form between the visible and the invisible world. Thus, visible dust was experienced ambiguously for several centuries. Peter Buggenhout earlier wrote about his work : pits and knots are more than imperfections4 . In a certain sense, this is true for dust too. Through his work, Peter Buggenhout makes clear that the concentration (knots) and openings, depths (pits) which are made tangible in his dust landscapes, seem imperfect at first sight, but are in reality so much more. The dust means the analogy to the invisible. They are the in-between-being and the in-between-becoming between visibility and invisibility.

3 Joseph H. Amato, Dust: a history of the small and the visible, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California
4 [tent.cat.] Peter Buggenhout. 'Wolken zijn geen bollen', double exhibition 'Gebroed'. Peter Buggenhout en Berlinde de Bruyckere, de Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, 2002-2002, p. 68.
Press, 2000.