opening Sunday 28.10, 3 - 6 pm
Broadway Boogie Woogie 45°, 2007, plastic tape on paper, 200 x 150 cm
Fragment of a text by Erno Vroonen, 2007:
It fascinated him to see how works of art were handled once they had left the studio: how, for example, they became the object of aggression and corruption. It was not the normal state of a painting in a museum that interested him; his inspiration came more from works mutilated by razor-sharp knives or corrosive acids, or which were simply forged. It was these subtle elements in the history of a painting that became the subject of his own creations. Another thing that fascinated Raat about forgeries was that it was precisely by comparing the original with the forged picture that one could uncover the true essence of a masterpiece. It was from this study that Raat developed his new ‘paintings’, which presented themselves to the outside world as reverse X-rays and cross-sections of thought processes. Starting from a small detail, he was able to penetrate to the final visual motif by means of cutting and pasting. The success of a work depended on whether one could still feel the energy of the original image at the end of the process.
