Dirk Zoete is a draughtsman above all: everything he does, stems from drawing. The differences between the artist’s drawings, models and installations lie in their execution. Zoete likes to use various stylistic modi operandi, as to reflect the schizoid nature of his praxis. This approach usually results in series of works, with titles such as ‘Flemish Voodoo’, ‘Collected Courage’ or ‘Cold Winter Poetry’. Some works are cerebral and lean to the investigative and probing, other series embrace chaos and the inherent erratic nature of human emotion. In his most recent work, a series of large-scale graphite drawings, Zoete investigates both the formal and the emotional relationships between a varied selection of objects and utensils. To this end, he lets them ‘interact’ on a small custom-built stage, as if he were testing a hypothesis, employing a hybrid shamanistic-scientific approach. The drawings themselves reflect this, as they are, at the same time, artifacts and ‘data’ culled via the ‘experiment’.
