Xavier Verhoest’s work

By Dale Webster, ex lecturer in Art History, Kirklees College, UK

The first of Xavier Verhoest’s images that I encountered were in a small exhibition space in Nairobi. They were large pictures which seemed to resist the confinement of the gallery space and expand into a picture space which was both figurative and abstract, the figurative elements providing access into to a deep internal space dominated by blues and grays, a sort of atmospheric perspective of the mind.

One in particular suggested an open sea stretching to a distant horizon crossed by breaking waves, but strangely, this “seascape” did not present openness and vastness, the usual characteristic of such a construction, but rather enclosure and containment. It is this apparent visual contradiction which is a theme running through much of his recent work, a theme which is at once unsettling and quite beautiful at the same time.

Xavier Verhoest is a Belgian artist working in Nairobi, Kenya. He has exhibited frequently in Kenya, and internationally both in Africa and Europe. Xavier was born in R D Congo where he lived with his family until moving to Europe to study Cinematography, the influence of which can still be seen in his work. For many years his “day job” centered on the plight of displaced persons, initially with Medecins Sans Frontieres, working in central Africa and Palestine.

More recently through his own project, Art2Be, he  uses the process of body mapping as creative and therapeutic tool for those affected by HIV, domestic violence, and sexual orientation. It’s this encounter with the horror of social and personal displacement which resonates in Xavier’s imagery.

It’s not easy to write about Xavier’s work and the layers of visual metaphor. If it were, I guess the images would be redundant. They certainly have an initial visual impact, and this belies the intricacies of small detail and thoughts, often expressed in written phrases which weave from the surface, where they should be, into and around elements in the picture space, sometimes fading as if rubbed out by the weather they encounter.

Thought integrated into the fabric of the picture. And the thoughts, the metaphors, seem consistently to focus on our inability to break free, from oppressors, taboos, clans, and in the end ourselves. Hence the contradiction in the painting of the wave. It originates in Gaza and a people contained, where the sea seems to offer an escape, but in reality it is of course another barrier, a further constraint. The metaphors expand. It’s as if we are led by these small details of tree or petal or stem, always natural elements, into a Rothcoesque internal space which by its very incoherence is quite repellent. There is no peace here. This is not a safe place. It is the place of the dispossessed and the displaced of the world.

In his most recent work these same ideas have been transposed into three-dimensional objects, sculptured forms, which whilst losing the abstract imaginary space of two dimensions, are made concrete in forms suggestive of a helmet, a miniature prison room or a faceless head set into the ground of a white cubic cage. One feels that these objects express something much more personal, much closer to the artists own experience of displacement. Through the very intimacy of these solid forms we are presented with the idea of a personal and cultural alienation from a world falling apart, a world in which he has spent his working life helping to reconstruct.

So, we have in these strangely sterile personal objects and apparently benign and beautiful images of sky, sea, flowers and trees, a powerful reflection on the nature of the human condition in its social, political and personal manifestation, and we are left with the contradictions with which we started, and which are at the very heart of the matter. The truth in Xavier Verhoest ’s work, the final extension of the visual metaphor, is that we cannot but be a part of, and yet we are of course, all of us, displaced