Pietà
Over a period of several years, Ludwig Vandevelde made a small series of sculptures on the historical-religious theme of the ‘Pietà’. He came out with seven sculptures, made with an unsurpassed technique of woodcarving and expressing a freezing emotional ‘cool’. The sculptures express emptiness, loneliness, sorrow and grief. In the book ‘Pieta. Fenomenologie van een creatieproces’ that he wrote alongside the making of the sculptures, he reflects on the process of artistic creation. He does so using a strict, but very poetical phenomenological description. In seven letters, he reflects on ‘writing’ as a method of thinking: the process of artistic creation as a journey of the Argonauts; the artwork as a sacrifice; the making of sculpture as a meaning generating process; the question of the ontological status of sculpture, compaired to the things around us; the tension between tradition and contemporaneity; the artist as a melancholic.
