MUSEUM TO SCALE 1/7

Willy De Sauter's work is characterized by a search for order and structure, in an attempt to penetrate to the essence. This immediately explains the importance of the vertical line, which the artist, trained as a graphic artist, repeatedly repeats since the early 1970s. He borrows vertical lines from pictures in magazines, repeats their pattern or plays with their length or thickness in series, sometimes until a single black surface emerges. When the laureate of the Young Belgian Painting Prize (1976) begins to work more spatially, explicit references to architecture appear. Thus De Sauter takes inspiration from the structure of modernist buildings, again focusing on the search for pure line and the relationship between the material and the immaterial. At the same time, his work enters more explicitly into dialogue with the space in which it is presented. Most architectural drawings are black and white, on paper or on panels worked with layers of chalk. After 2000, the line structure disappears from the latter and De Sauter makes only monochrome panels and objects, where matter and light mainly determine the experience.