Dick Verdult

"The Panoptic perspective turns and turns" is based on a diagram in a booklet Verdult made in 1995 to outline the development of his work in the following 10 to 20 years. This work shows how Dick Verdult perceives everything as a choreography and how he is willing to move in it with his work. Verdult's programmatic piece "Het Panoptisch Perspectief Draait Altijd Door" (The Panoptic Perspective Turns and Turns) which spans two decades from it's inception as a drawing with text to its realization as a sculpture, documents the fact that Verdult does have some heroes - artists, writers, filmmakers and others whose work he respects and admires. But in his own work, he imitates nobody. Verdult is not subservient to a particular style, let alone to anyone's expectations. The 'work' for him is not an object, but a relation created between different actors and materials. Verdult's work is therefore interactive in a fundamental sense: it is realized through an act of communication. He shares this communicative attitude with contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, John Bock or the late Christoph Schlingensief, whose work in film, theatre, installation and live performance seems related (the passionate oscillation between art and reality, the deconstruction of truth, the commitment to chance and accident, the mixing of medias and genres), though theirs is more driven by a "will to express" an less aggressively eclectic than Verdult's. In these quite different oeuvres, the presence of the artist as an artificial figure plays an important role, an artist who is not identical with his work, but closely allied and sometimes inseparable, or indistinguishable, from his work. This aspect is even stronger when the work is developed in groups of people whose open composition becomes part of the artistic process itself. (From: the book "And on Sundays we celebrate Friday", Van Abbemuseum, 2011)