Nos lieux de bonheur

A light wind ruffles the mountain of sand, accentuating uneven fractures, setting off slow cascades, erasing what remains of footprints. The heavier tracks of construction vehicles are likewise exposed to disappearance. Between inner life and the emptiness of an hourglass, the accumulated grains slide silently toward the ground, absorbing the rustlings of solitude. Faint palpitations ripple through the mass of colors, between pale gray and deep, tenebrous black, as if the bareness of the site amplified and condensed, through Benjamin Hollebeke’s charcoal drawings, the desert vision of this zone of mounds and dunes artificially swollen by the haulage of machines.

Nevertheless, the emptiness of the eroded sands allows our porous memory to carve a passage through it, in narrow waters. Off-screen, on the slopes of the opposing mountain, covered with limestone rocks, flint, and wild bushes and trees, a flock of birds has nested in the tall grass. It offers reassurance to the gaze, suggesting that alongside the initial fascination with bareness, the presence of emotions and sensations, bearers of memories, can also emerge. The “desert of emptiness” becomes a journey into our sensitive inner space. Discreet, fragile, stretched, at times distant, the balance thus traced by the artist’s eye forms the meditative and intimate structure of living beings, at least of those for whom re-enchanting life is no trivial matter.

In front of this artwork by Benjamin Hollebeke, the watcher discovers himself, as geographer Louis Poirier once wrote, as “the sole master of a secret land, which seems, for him alone, to let shine through the faint reflection of a buried treasure.” Nos lieux de bonheur (Our places of happiness).