Someone said to me:

“The pink sphere is of course the Earth.” The Earth with gravity. The paintbrush is attached to it. The brush cannot escape and cannot do what it was made for, namely to write or paint … the brush accepts its fate. The Earth and the brush do not really belong together, but they have come together ‘by chance’. I think we can trust chance more than we do, because the work has become a beautiful and harmonious whole; the vertical line is delightful and promising, triumphant even, I think of a spinning top! Is this a plea for the unexpected, for illogical connections? Or are the relationships between things subject to a logic that has not yet been unraveled? Are we a little foolish, sometimes?”

“I also thought that the Earth is nourished with images and representations through the brush; the brush does not paint then, but works like an antenna and brings images of the world, as if through an IV, into the Earth. Images it does not yet know, so to speak; the pink Earth is still so young and empty ….”

“Certainly,” I said, “it could therefore also have been called the Waiting Room. In fact every artwork is a waiting room, the exhibition is also a waiting room, life is also a waiting room, everything is a waiting room where everyone waits for a marriage with … the world.”

“Oh, but then you are the matchmaker, the one who arranges it!”

“Certainly, very gladly, but it can also turn out differently, because logic cannot hold the world together, that is clear.”—Henk Visch, Eindhoven, 14 October 2024

As a starting point for this exhibition, guest curator Jos van der Sommen chose a sculpture by Eindhoven artist Henk Visch entitled Le mariage arrangé. He also borrowed the title of the exhibition from this sculpture.

“I experience the sculpture: Le mariage arrangé (2021) by Henk Visch as a kind of longing for painting, or perhaps it is a sculpture that wants to say: ‘I would like to be a painter.’ To continue this desire for painting, in every room of the Van Abbehuis there is a sculpture by Henk Visch that may enter into a dialogue with one or more paintings.

For this conversation, five artists have been invited, four of whom I did not know personally. In the past, I had seen works by them, and they became imprinted on my retina. In this way the exhibition becomes a conversation between diverse approaches, different visual languages, two and three-dimensional works, from which, hopefully, a suitable partner will emerge,” says Jos van der Sommen.