Loek Grootjans

Loek Grootjans strives for a high and intense degree of consciousness in his work.

May 1988. Winter past, first days of spring. A studio located on a farmyard, a compartment in an old pigsty. The roof is light-proof and has already been insulated with expanded polystyrene and agricultural plastic. Small gaps and windows have been boarded up and seeled ten times over.

Years of working in dark rooms has taught that eventually the human eye will manage to detect light in every darkness. The ventilation grills can be adjusted by means of strings from a fixed point. Here, there is also a tape recorder that has the largest available reels and is already in the record position so that only the pause button must be released in order to talk to this equipment. Nearby there is a Calor gas stove and a provisions chest with tinned food and dry rice at the ready. And water, just water. No beer, no wine; just water.

No radio, no television. No music. The telephone is disconnected. Only the sound of distance will permeate: the sound of the farmer at work and of the birds who beat the time of night and day. There is no dog nor cat.

The farmer from the farmyard knows nothing of this world of isolation and concentration that has been created here. Moreover, Loek Grootjans is masked when, in that month in 1988, he embarks on this journey through darkness, with the basics within reach and only protected against the elements, blind for the outside, on the way through himself, away from the world behind the eyes, not so as to know but so as to share the activity of the essence of the existence.

A green space with books with green covers. Each book is identical, on each page the word 'more' is printed followed by '(..........)'. In the space we hear a litany of 2300 times the word 'more' followed by a conception. If one would fulfil all these notions that were carefully collected by Loek Grootjans, one would have complete power.

The work 'GOOD CARE' consists of parts of sentences on the walls of the gallery, each of them is typical for an individual or a group of people. The textpanels are connected with eachother like in a diagram. The base of the work is the slogan 'who takes good care of himself, takes good care of thoose who choose him'.

This work was also the motive for his first literary work 'Visoen van de overkant'. Like the work 'GOOD CARE' it consists of a large number of statements that form a collection of what people occupies in their happiness, fear, hope, desires, obscenities, angers,... It shows like in a litany an infinite row of variants on wisdoms, greed, idiocy, shamelessness and other manners.

It is the inventory of human success and failure.