Hokus Pokus At Full Moon, Hokus Pokus Pick A Side

Tom Poelmans has an exhibition at KIOSK and presents a new book: A Spirit in Painting. With this, he leaves behind a period of 15 years of painting and does so with great anticipation for what is yet to come. A selection of 62 paintings was made for the exhibition, while the book shows a different selection of 30 paintings. The front and back of all the canvases can be seen (or have been seen) on exhibition wall and on paper. The front of the painting Hokus Pokus at Full Moon is depicted on the back of the book. A full moon looks through the book, through the canvas, through the years.

Liene Aerts

Tom, I see a few moments passing by your moon, and I feel invited to shine a light on them:

Seeing your 2010 work Paradise City again, I think back to where you were when I wrote something for you following your selection for the Camille Huysmans Prize: “The way Tom Poelmans approaches his paintings is directly linked to his working environment. As driven and impulsive as he is in selecting his colours and techniques, his studio became effortlessly filled with all kinds of colourful, comical objects and materials. His painting Troubles in Paradise also emerged from this wall-high multitude of sources of inspiration. Like an explosion of colour, it emerges as an almost sculptural entity in the space of the studio. A working environment that, in its limitations, testifies to a great openness and something indefinable, but above all to a joyful desire to paint.”

From our conversations over the past few weeks, I gather that your drive for painting feels just as intense 15 years later, even more urgent. You speak of a moment of completion, of coming closer to yourself. I sense a desire to search for the moment to capture an image and to do so from abstraction, from intuition rather than from thorough figuration or a preconceived idea.

The moon is illuminated to its maximum by the sun and appears perfectly round and yellow. It does not give off any light itself; its front side reflects the sun's light into the night. Its back side is grey, grey like the stone it is. Its enormous energy field affects us and brings transformation, letting go, reflection. This is precisely what I observe happening under the full moon in your book cover work Hokus Pokus at Full Moon: the body depicted in metamorphosis is bird-human, woman-man, anonymous-Tom, siren-griffin. The dragon roars at the moon, at its mystique.

The next day, you will make an equally powerful gesture in KIOSK. The act of “reversing” is so much more than just a physical action. It is a reflection, a decision, daring to take sides. Or, as one of your selected works is titled, Choosing is losing? Hokus Pokus! Turn the back into the front and see what emerges.

You are sitting at a table, signing your books by hand, with freehand drawings, one after the other. At the same time, the paintings are turned over one by one, chronologically and slowly. The period from 2009-2010 to 2025 passes in one long gesture of reversal, of change of form, from then to now. The slow moment creates space to look, plenty of time to move.

Tom, I see the spirit in your painting! It emerges, becoming freer and more diverse with every hour, more virtuosic and stranger, constantly changing form. You grab hold, drifting here and there into something, but you always let go, so you can grab hold of something new with new energy. Each work stands on its own. All the works give life to each other and together form a monumental image on wheels. Or is the work itself the wheel? Your dancing skeletons come to tell me: everything is what it is – nothing is what it seems. And also, everything is changing – nothing stays the same.

I hold your book by its back cover and leaf through it backwards. I find a text collaged from magazines with sentences such as: “THE seeker. INVESTS To the rhythm of MYTHICAL magic The quest depends on eternity” and “the Balcony of doubt is WITHIN REACH and the POSSIBILITIES ENDLESS!”

Further on, written in your handwriting, it says “Painting is like a film, when you see the making of, you get the picture.” I revisit the book and the exhibition in this light.

Each transition comes with a kind of search for resolution, a taking stock. You lay everything open and take us back and forth in time, to your creative processes and innermost thoughts in the form of drawings, collages, poems, aphorisms, pieces of text by yourself and by people close to you. I see an inexhaustible search for doors, mirrors, treasures and keys.

With A Spirit in Painting in the back of my mind, I reach for Henri Michaux's Hoekpijlers (“Corner pillars”) and note from the latter: “On the reverse side that resembles the front, in the midst of a grasp without a foothold, during the hours, at the beginning of the endlessly extended space and time, outside deception, inside deception, peasant deception – tell me, what are you doing? What are you, nocturnal darkness in the heart of a stone?”

I step inside a brilliant stone. I experience something complex, intimate, almost impenetrable. I attempt to describe the place at its core, including what moves me within it.

Your studio is a modestly sized, square room with a single central skylight. It is your private interior space. It seems like an extension of your mind and body. Everything revolves around the (yet to be) filled space, the seating and viewing area. The breathing and movement space seems secondary. One corner provides just enough space for you, a chair and a work surface. For the moment, a still life of objects around you is brought to life on a handy wooden panel. The collected items overflow, flow into each other, everything sticks together plastically, integrates time, becomes timeless, colours each other like played plasticine.

The few cut-out quotes catch my eye: “Work hard” and “Take up the fight”. I look at the T I M E tattoo on your fingers. In KIOSK, I saw titles such as Ce n'est pas le temps qui passe mais nous - Le Facteur Cheval, Painting beats death and Painting is the devil. Or on one of the backs it says When I'm dead and in my grave and all my bones are rotten, these paintings will tell my name when I am quite forgotten. Tom, Time is on your heels.

The work is oblivious to time. It has the final say in the form of A Poelmans Parade of eloquent backsides and aphorisms, from a Painting Party to a Nightmare on Painting Street.

The entire Hidden History and Lost World have been scoured.

The Party Animal and the Prince of Darkness within you have been consulted.

The Blue Dream already said it: ‘Listen to your gut, Poelmans!’

Secrets of a lost empire seem to be slowly coming into view.

No Crossing the River without Collateral Damage.

But also, Panta rhei, ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’ (Heraclitus).

We can do what they did here, hiss the Horny Bastards as they jump.

‘The right choice is always on the opposite side of what we think, especially when it comes to our search for the space we need.’ (Wim Cuyvers)

Under the Supermoon and in good spirits, Daydreamer steps forward into the Tropical Cloud Forest.

Hotter than a fantasy?

Wall filling?

Was all this the ‘Demon Host’ Prelude?

Curious about the next game, Breakdancer alias B-Batman!

Break a bone, keep wheeling. The best part after a journey is yet to come.