It is yourselves you see and what you are

Soloshow Wido Blokland

Vernissage: Thursday 19 October, 19:30

In his work, Wido Blokland searches for the deepest nature of reality - including our own - to arrive at the unanimous and inescapable conclusion that the one who sees, the seeing itself and what is seen constitute one and the same 'being'.

Sources from philosophy, mysticism, spirituality and alchemy form the background against which Blokland's artistic practice takes place. Blokland sees his role as an artist as authentically representing the numinous experience. Precisely because the work of art cannot or will not answer in terms of concepts, premises or propositions, it puts us directly in touch with our own emotional experience.

The title 'It Is Yourselves You See And What You Are' is taken from a poem by the late-15th-century Persian poet and mystic Attar, revealing for Blokland the deepest insight into the nature of the reality that surrounds us: the universe is nothing more and nothing less than a mirror of consciousness. With a selection of recent and older work, the artist puts us in touch with his thinking, giving the mirror a central symbolic role.

Wido Blokland: "Our deepest being is also like a mirror. Only reflection, the casting back of what appears in front of it. Everything that happens to us, all experiences, states of mind, thoughts, take place before the mirror, which is only pure witness - it never happens to the mirror. [...] The recent Foglia works, which may have some resonance with artists as diverse as Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Ettore Spaletti, Jan Dibbets and Francis Bacon, represent the portrayal of a mystical truth, namely the fact that the observer, the perceiving and the perceived are in reality one inseparable whole."