Broken Texts

Broken Texts by Xavier Verhoest (from 2011 till today)

It is essential that my work exists outside any defined historical timeline. I don’t want the viewer to recognize a place through a romantic or political lens. What I seek to evoke is a condition—timeless, persistent, and heartbreakingly repetitive. You can’t look away from it. I couldn’t. It defined me the moment I was confronted with it.

I remember Mogadishu—moonlight veiled behind the clouds of violence. The tears of love in Kwale, shared with the LGBTI community. The wide eyes of street children in Djibouti, with untold stories. The inescapable sea in Gaza—so beautiful, so imprisoning. The whispered dream of a Promised Land called Europe, shared by migrants in Sicily. The confessions of former Al Shabab fighters in Kenya. The beauty of the Afghan people. And the big red elephant in the room—HIV—haunting Nairobi. So many moments. So many memories that still echo within me.

My first true encounter with an image—one that shook me—was when I was seven. Before that, it was all comic strips, Tex Avery, Disney, Tintin, and other animated worlds. Then I saw the footage. Grainy, haunting black-and-white film of Allied forces entering the concentration camps. Mass graves. Piles of lifeless, nameless bodies. Dehumanized. Erased. I remember the overwhelming sense of hopelessness. And the incomprehension. How could the world allow this?

In Rwanda, Burundi, Palestine, and Kenya—places that have shaped me, places where I’ve lived some of my most intense, beautiful, and difficult years—the question of remembrance has always haunted me. How do we honor the ones who are gone? How do we hold memory in a world so quick to forget?

This collective amnesia terrifies me. It allows history to repeat itself—again and again. And politics, too often, uses forgiveness like makeup: covering wounds instead of healing them. And through it all, silence looms. An unnatural silence—enforced by systems of politics, religion, culture—that teach us not to speak, not to feel, not to remember.

There’s another the silence within us: our capacity to accept the unacceptable, to blur guilt and innocence, to fear difference. Can we truly embrace diversity—not just tolerate it, but celebrate it—as something deeply human? Something sacred?

My work with Art2Be and as an artist has been my way of gently breaking that silence. Through body mapping, storytelling, and memory-based tools, we have opened quiet but powerful conversations around identity, sexual orientation, HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence, displacement, belonging… and hope. It became a language of healing.

This kind of social and political engagement is at the core of who I am—as an artist and as a human being. Even when it’s not overt. I often choose not to be loud. My art is where I go when words feel too heavy. It’s my refuge. My secret space. Because sometimes, too many words can kill the truth.

This has taken many forms.

Landscapes and skies—drawn from photographs I took during the 2007 post-election violence—don’t offer vast, open spaces. Instead, they are tight, restrained, claustrophobic. They are landscapes of the mind. Places of inner silence.

They may appear abstract, but that abstraction comes from erasure. They are shaped by silence.

A silence I witness every day—both in personal pain and in the collective silence of institutions.

There’s a painful beauty in this contradiction: the stunning sky above, and the violence below. That contrast runs through much of my work. With time, I’ve begun to use tents and built structures as symbols—of confinement, of stigma, of “othering.” These pieces are deeply rooted in the psycho-imaginative techniques we use at Art2Be. They reflect how people live—with fear, shame, and silence—and how, little by little, they move toward self-acceptance.

In the series I Have Only What I Remember, I created sculptures and drawings inspired by the lives of internally displaced people—people who shared their stories with me. These works resemble homes, helmets, sometimes even brains. They attempt to give form to silence, to the aching difficulty of opening up, to the almost impossible task of creating space for dialogue around deep, inherited wounds—wounds rooted in colonialism, national identity, and generational pain.

Memento Mori—Remember You Will Die. For years, I visited churches in Belgium and Italy. Their light, shadow, and quiet stayed with me. Many of my works now carry this title. They are meditations on mortality, on fragility, on what it means to be alive. They ask what it means to carry both darkness and light inside us. They offer no answers—only space. For reflection. For memory. For the invisible threads that shape us.

Most of my work begins with a photograph—transferred onto paper or vinyl. And from there, something begins. The image becomes a surface to interrogate, to wear down, to rebuild. I apply, erase, destroy, add, remove, anticipate—until something unexpected emerges. Sometimes this takes days. Sometimes weeks.

I rarely know what I’m searching for—only that I need to keep searching. It’s a slow process. A way of inventing a space that didn’t exist before. A kind of personal erasure. Each piece is a fragment of a chaotic jigsaw. I try to obscure the specifics of the original image. I want it to feel like it could come from anywhere.

Because the world has taught me: one place can hold many truths. Maybe, in the end, I’m the subject.

Time is on the side of the artist. My process is layered and slow. A dialogue between pigments, acrylics, oils, pastels, charcoal, and ashes. It’s a liquid process. Drying becomes part of the thinking. Sensibility accumulates over time—layered like sediment. I must be patient. Always asking: What makes this image matter? Can it carry a weight beyond my own life?

I believe the indirect holds more power. It leaves space for sensation to rise without explanation. I want to understand what I make—but I also want to be challenged by it. These images are in constant formation. They hold both fluidity and structure, fragility and force, calm and unease.

In this saturated, overstimulated world, I find myself reaching for essence—for light, for depth, for something that echoes through the senses. I want ambiguity—in the making, in the reading, in the interpretation. These aren’t finished images. They are images becoming.

Painting, to me, is like weather—shifting, dissolving, flowing, ending. Maybe that’s all we’re left with in the end: the souvenir of the image. The obscure and the clear. A reflection of time’s passage. A mirror of the ever-fleeting human condition.

My identity, like my images, is not fixed. I can’t offer any definitive statement about reality—only about my relationship to it. And that relationship is messy, uncertain, imprecise. I work with the accident. I paint without convention, but with discipline—repeating the accident until it becomes form.

I’m drawn to surfaces. To the tactile experience of material. I build layers of meaning, only to blur them again. I’m chasing a different kind of reality—one that suggests itself through presence alone.

Sometimes, nothing happens in the image—only the sea, the clouds, the wind. But that “nothing” is everything. It’s the attempt to strip meaning bare, until something elemental remains. I feel closest to the swell of the ocean. The silence of the wind. In that stillness, I find absence—and presence.

I look to nature, and its silence, as a horizon of the Sublime—as seen in 18th-century landscapes. The landscape, to me, is a form of contemplation. A moment before human interference—and perhaps, peace that will return once we are gone.

This is the story of our eternal ruins. My inability to answer in the face of so much suffering. How can history ask the questions, and yet be incapable of answering them? What is history—and what are our stories? Who am I—who are you—to tell them?

The blue of night. The darkened road. Before me. Within me. It is often the sky, or the sea. I search for a territory where thought can rest. A place like another breath.

Within me are images of the sea in Gaza. That is one of the starting points—the sea as ultimate border. The sea in front. The prison behind. Another wall. Impassable. Today, total destruction, an holocaust, another one.

And yet—water, always and again—remains a symbol of life. Of rebirth. The origin. Our shared territory. A mental expanse, and a body. The sky—for its substance, a gathering of particles. The final territory we might all share, in the face of everything that divides us.

And still… hardly anyone lives with the clouds anymore. The cities rise, and the vertical devours the horizontal.