2025 12.09.25 - 25.10.25
Map and Territory
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Witold Vandenbroeck
In the paintings of Witold Vandenbroeck, forms emerge that feel both familiar and elusive: tubes, vessels, smooth contours that hint at networks, routes, and flows. They evoke the visible and invisible infrastructures through which people and matter move — water through pipes, blood through veins, trains through tunnels.
Inspired by Borges’ On Exactitude in Science, Vandenbroeck doesn’t depict maps as representations of the world, but rather explores how abstraction can overwhelm reality itself. His works are not cartographic, but compact visual systems — snapshots in which movement momentarily comes to a halt. They speak of orientation and disorientation, of seeking control and embracing loss.
Vandenbroeck paints with distemper — pigment mixed with animal glue — a medium that demands speed and focus. His colours are dense, opaque, and tactile. Each painting becomes an exercise in timing, in restraint, in containment — as if capturing a fragment of a vanishing map, just before it dissolves into dust.
In the paintings of Witold Vandenbroeck, forms emerge that feel both familiar and elusive: tubes, vessels, smooth contours that hint at networks, routes, and flows. They evoke the visible and invisible infrastructures through which people and matter move — water through pipes, blood through veins, trains through tunnels.
Inspired by Borges’ On Exactitude in Science, Vandenbroeck doesn’t depict maps as representations of the world, but rather explores how abstraction can overwhelm reality itself. His works are not cartographic, but compact visual systems — snapshots in which movement momentarily comes to a halt. They speak of orientation and disorientation, of seeking control and embracing loss.
Vandenbroeck paints with distemper — pigment mixed with animal glue — a medium that demands speed and focus. His colours are dense, opaque, and tactile. Each painting becomes an exercise in timing, in restraint, in containment — as if capturing a fragment of a vanishing map, just before it dissolves into dust.