Mar 14 - May 04, 2025 | Genk (BE)
Hamelryck’s works carry us along in the visual rhythms he applies pastily onto his dark supports—a serial repetition that shifts and differs again and again. A visual poetry unfolds on the irregular skin of his works—their silver linings, if you will. Perhaps this is why he was so devoted to graphite? It is precisely here, in the frayed edges of the image, that a refined play between light and dark, white and black, between viewer and artwork, materiality and emptiness, time and space, emerges. His textures and accents make the surface vibrate, as if a hidden dynamic lurks in the apparent stillness. It is these glimmers and sparkles that give Hamelryck’s works an additional finesse—a perceptual pleasure that leads us to the realization: black is a color.
For Nothing Really Ends, we have made a careful selection from Ado Hamelryck’s oeuvre—not with the ambition of being exhaustive, but to give a representative impression of his artistic signature. And it is one of patience, silence, stillness and deceleration—an extraordinary way of seeing and working that is often at odds with the frenetic pace of our time. Hamelryck had little use for speed. Rather, he compared his artistic persistence to the steady gait of a marathon runner. Or, even better, to that of the tortoise in the classic fable of Aesop, who defeats his opponent, the hare, with perseverance and determination. This exhibition also testifies to that, even now that the artist is no longer here. Everything is a matter of time. The art that Ado Hamelryck leaves us shows how an end is only a horizon—an imaginary line that does not draw a boundary, but marks a new beginning.
