Since the mid-nineties, Johan De Wilde has been making pencil drawings. In the periphery of this, he also creates prints, photo series, graphic art, collages and texts. His meticulous, labour-intensive style is the antithesis to the fast pace of life and the transience of our overly saturated digital visual culture. De Wilde’s drawings are built up like paintings: layer upon layer. They consist of horizontal and vertical lines between which the suggestion of shapes or numbers is interwoven. With graphite and coloured pencils, the artist chiefly draws on archival cardboard. He usually works in A4 format because he wants his drawings to be as universal as possible; this is quite simply the most commonly used paper size. De Wilde’s oeuvre is never straightforward. His images are more likely to trigger our associative powers than to impose well-defined meanings.
