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At the centre of the work of Paul De Vylder (1942) we find the ambiguous relation between sign and meaning. He is at the same time artist and theoretician, painter and semiotician, alchemist and deconstructivist. Sophisticated game strategies are central in his work that evolved from a strange kind of (pseudo-) figurative form of painting through the making of objects and installations to the photographing of staged performances. But it is always concerned with signs.
Criticism on, and the short-circuiting of, mimesis is characteristic for Paul De Vylder's work from the early 80s. Already in these works De Vylder demonstrated that Western rationality is far from evident and obvious, and that it can only be generalised through violence (thereby of course abolishing itself). He exposed the barbarism at the base of every culture. Discipline (1980) con-sists of large pitch-painted banners in which Lieven De Cauter recognised an homage to the theo-ries of Michel Foucault about discipline and punishment. The same meaning is evoked by the negative realistic paintings of Quarantaine (1982), the stretchers of Gjölbaschi, the iconographi-cal description of power in Gringo Total (1983), the straitjackets of Gjölbaschi II (1986). The works from this period are nicely summed up in what Lieven De Cauter called "an archaeology of the stereotype". De Vylder himself called Quarantaine “cunning mediation". These are works in which the miracle of representation, the / [the slash] of Saussurian semiotics, the magic trick of Christian rhetoric appears in front of the eyes of the spectator. But Paul De Vylder makes his history paintings with a roofing product: he paints with pitch. His paintings are deconstructed representations (long before this term became itself an academic cliché), populated with monsters without adrenaline which often allude to Nazi- or heimat aesthetics. The world painted by De Vylder is in decomposition: decayed – and according to bourgeois rhetoric – wrongly framed, brought together in twisted proportions, fitted into an impossible space.
De Vylder's painting, which foreshadows neo-figurative painting of the nineties, has ultimately proven to be a philosophical wrong track for him. Be it a very fruitful, even pregnant one. A phase, a ladder that had to be climbed in order to be then conceptually discarded. That discarding happened in Rebus/Rebis (1988): works that are joined together like Siamese twins, sometimes half object, half painting: frivolous hermaphrodites of sculpture and painting. The redoubling con-tinued in the Cappella Famosa, probably the most decisive phase in De Vylder's oeuvre. The works from the Cappella Famosa also have a double structure: neo-classical like etchings (them-selves reflections of frescoes in the Vatican) are combined with strange, magical objects: sacrificial axes, blade-like wedges, lead-clad cones topped by sickles, a row of pétanque balls. The doubling, the critical juxtaposition, the play with look-a likes is often very subtle and complex in these works.
In a next phase of De Vylder’s work this mimetic imitation is – at first sight – abandoned. Repre-sentation is replaced by the far more direct constructing of heterogeneous objects: the Hiero-glyphica. De Vylder puts away his brushes and pitch buckets and starts with the grafting, weld-ing together, assembling of extravagant objects. Like the Karnavarie: a finely decorated candle-holder in embossed silver with on top of it three paper clowns on sticks like you get with a chil-dren's ice-cream. De Vylder's liberating laugh can finally be seen in his work. Even when he tack-les an old theme like Het theorema van Zeuxis: a mannequin casting from under a fur coat a per-spective glance, distorted into a leaden, scaled nose. Or the Salle Julien Lahaut: a fox preaching on top of the frame of a steel zeppelin. Or Le vide du signifiant: a crowing rooster on top of a long metal staircase (supported by a sharp pike) spitting out a kind of deformed golden form of itself. Or - from the earlier series Loyalties (1989): De Vylder's own version of the logo of the HMV-record company: the Loyalty I. You could call it His Master's Mind: a dog with the end of a gramophone horn (now narrowed into one of those typical De Vylder cones) pointed to his fore-head.
In his latest work De Vylder uses the banality of the omnipresent medium photography to arrive at a desubstantiation of his Hieroglyphica. The work is called Cargo Cult: The Trickeries and Ritual Cunning of the Western Iconological Tradition (1996). He makes photographs young an-drogynous female bodies which he uses to play a diabolical semiotic game with the spectator (one of his projects is to unmask semiotics as a kind of diabolics). The models are posed, distorted in or on strange metal constructions but even more in pseudo classical, emotionless postures. Their attitudes have only a differential value which he opposes in a series. They are mimetic machines which De Vylder calls ‘machinae’. Another variant on this is a Sacra Converzasione, a non sig-nificant version of a classic theme in the form of a triptych of photographs.
One could interpret all this combinatory welding together of disparate elements in De Vylder’s work as a nostalgia for a lost unity, a Benjaminian or baroque longing for a paradisaical state of unitary innocence. In De Vylder's work and in his texts undoubtedly the suspicion lurks that this manifold of materials, viewpoints, disciplines, is ultimately nothing else but a fata morgana. The rift, the dualism, lover and shadow, original and copy, the alchemistic figures of Jacin and Boaz, now as sun and moon/king and queen, then dressed up as the Saussurian signifier/signified: they continue to obsess De Vylder. He remains a duo-artist, the last of the romantic split personali-ties. But since Rebus/Rebis he is also the god of oxygen welders. The joiner of what can't be joined. The hermaphrodite, the rebus/rebis, the builder of hieroglyphica. In his Hieroglyphica and photo series De Vylder elevates the misalliance to the status of method. He welds, combines, as-sembles, amalgamates, invents an alchemistic marriage. His sign is the Pythagorean Y which is so close to his, De Vylder's, heart. He fuses the disparate, professes the 'concordia discors' of the renaissance magi. His sign Y unites the incompatible J(acin) and B(oaz) into the new figure of Jyb, the ape-like anti-Job: trickster and victim at the same time.
In November 1992 Paul De Vylder wrote a beautiful text for a colleague artist, entitled ‘De O van Giotto’. He reminds us of this story told by Vasari: the Pope asked the painter Giotto a proof of his art. Giotto responded by drawing in one stroke with a brush and red paint on a piece of pa-per. He drew of course a circle, a red circle. The envoy of the Pope inquired whether this was the only drawing he could show to his papal superior. To which Giotto replied abruptly that this was more than enough. De Vylder's comments: "Serious historians could point to the neo-platonic background of the period in which the anecdote is told, they could argue that Giotto's O is a material token of a higher reality, of a pure idea [...]" But poses De Vylder: [...] Giotto's O is in the first place a drawing, [...] a sign of itself. [....] "drawing" before meaning something else, means itself."
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