Letter to Sylvain

Dear Sylvain,

Now I write you this letter, a letter you will never read, because language for you was superfluous and so it never grew. Besides, what can words really add to a painting? Did we not begin painting precisely because words fall short? While image is so transparent and dense, like a fist clenched within the forehead, so all-encompassing, so all-bearing as a snail? What could words possibly add to your paintings, or to mine? However comforting they may be, these paintings ask our questions, never provide us with answers.

Do you ask questions? Do you expect answers? What are you trying to tell me? I say, “Hello Sylvain,” and you nod, blink (your gaze darting from my face to the floor where it lingers); I say, “That’s a beautiful painting you made,” and again you nod, this time a bit more emphatically (your gaze sweeping the floor, our feet); and in my studio, where you are visiting, a woman sits on the edge of a paint-smeared chair–a pallet chair–her long legs crossed high, and she asks: “Hey Sylvain, how old are you now?” And, overwhelmed by all that attention, all that distant noise, you fumble in the pockets of your ever-present summer jacket, searching, finding, and showing us: your ID card. So what?

What happened to you? What happened to me? Something. Something that began long ago and never stopped happening: The River. That too-wide, unknown River. Only the painter crosses it. The painter, alone. There, on the other side, in a landscape so differently arranged, a place that pulls him in. There he must search for the painting, find it, and bring it back. His barge steering past hellish-looking yellow whirlpools and rocks lurking just below the water’s surface, him rowing against the rubber waves.

He brings the painting back, the new painting back and back again to the crowded shore. Where it may amaze, soothe, perhaps even heal those who wait for it there with wide open hearts. Those who need the painting. That’s what I’ve done my whole life, Sylvain. I leave, away from the sheltered but  unbearable life of the crowded shore, for the elusive and marvellous other side, and come back again (so far, I have always come back), the image–l’image–lashed to my back, imprisoned, grown into my spine. Row, row, row, and sometimes damage. Fear.

But you, Sylvain, you once left for the far shore. Long ago. You never came back. You stayed. You became invisible, untouchable. That other dimension, that other system where everything is, where reality leaps against you like a spotted puppy.

Only your paintings come back. Drifting, swaying between the weed, the wreckage, and the foam of the waves, against the heavy current, until they wash up trembling in the now so different light–the oval light–of the crowded shore.

But not you. You stayed behind, made your home there. From your barge remains, only remains some smeared planks, rotting in the prickling reeds. A skeleton. Sometimes, when I’m there, searching, waiting, wandering, I see you: slanting against the edge, then shifting, shy and fragile (as though you moved on a spiral of glass), gliding through the faraway dunes. I wave. Hesitantly, you raise your hand, at hip height. I can’t stay. I have to get back before the wind makes the tide turn.

You stay behind. You’re right. One day I will stay too. I hope.

Goodbye, my painter friend, see you soon. Yes.

Philippe Vandenberg

January 12, 2002

Madness leaves no trace, so “how can we get through it?” is the question the artist asks himself.