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Light and dark determine what I try to shape in marble. Inspiration gives light its own way of existence in a specific volume. Light’s versatility within the shape’s characteristics is the other of the one represented by space. The one is the other. In essence such an image made into a balance of light bears meditation, a kind of all-time: an indefinable own being that has brought into being an a-dimensional space in time.
On 22 October 1962 the dissolution of the G58 Group is a fact. Jan Dries embarks on his own adventure. One can establish that by 1960 he has provided the key to his oeuvre, that everything has been clearly formulated and that from that moment onwards all his work has been part of the magnificent discourse about that what from the beginning has been certain in all its duality: spirituality and sensuality, the female and the male, day and night, the complete, the complementary realities, the paradoxes, the contradictions but also the necessity for coexistence, fitting in, the invitation to touch, the caressing, the banding together, the mating, the spasm, the conic bliss.
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With his ceramic abstract art, founding member of G58 Jan Dries showed how forward-thinking he was during the artist group’s many initiatives. With his strongly abstract and multicoloured figures that seem to belong to a phantasmagoric world he was a Belgian pioneer of a movement which developed right before and after WWII. At that time most visual artists resorted to materials and techniques that belonged to the domain of applied arts.