There are many ways of wondering about the world, of asking it the question that inhabits us from morning to night, from birth to death : the unique question that contains all others and that only belongs to oneself. But still one must find its form, its own sound. Often a lifetime is not enough. Some of us, however, persist despite the obstacles. Sometimes through painting. Denis De Mot is one of them.
When he spreads out, one after another, his layers of acrylic or gouache, and between each of them poses a gesture, a trace, barely a sign, my sense is that he is sending out a question the way one casts a bottle to the sea, a coin in the fountain of Trevi. Because you never know. Because beneath the kindly eyes of the gods and the centuries, by the accidents of tides and layers, a miracle can always take place and the question takes form, a form one was not expecting. Because burying is giving back to the gesture its part of the unconscious and to memory its part of amnesia. This is how there is a chance of seeing appear what one was looking for without knowing it.
And the miracle, often, takes place.
Denis De Mot then puts down his work and starts off with layers on another surface. In layers and in question. The one that just surprised him – or another. It depends. The link between his successive paintings, the coherence that runs through them, is there, in the work itself : posing again and again the question that one layer imposes on the next, however different it is each time. As if the sole grandeur of Man with respect to heaven is to wonder and ask, again and again, even when we know that it is forever mute.
Pascale De Visscher
June 2004