'Try again, fail again, fail better'

Hilde Overbergh's practice is of a special kind. She starts from painting, but we should no longer think of an easel, a stretcher, brushes and tubes of paint. What she creates are not classical paintings but painterly images, and how are they created? In many different ways, and above all very unconventionally. With Hilde Overbergh, nothing is predetermined; her art is fluid and always in motion.

There is a strategy, however, and it begins with surrendering to what presents itself in the everyday world around her. On the street, under the boards of the garden terrace, in the corner of her studio, in a rubbish bin, wherever she walks, her eye is drawn to things that no longer matter, that have been left behind or thrown away, just like that, because they are no longer usable, broken, worn out, lost. These may be torn posters stuck together, a chair leg, a piece of foam, a scrap of fabric, a sweet wrapper, a hinge. Whatever they may be, these things have lost their former function. They have “simply” become material again, without function, without economic value. Defenceless and open, waiting for nothing. And then they become interesting to her. Suddenly she can see potential in these things, the beginning of a new image. From what has been discarded, something new is born, thanks to the artist who sees opportunities in the disorder to create something new.

A strategy based on chance.
An example of this is “Sand, Drill, Scratch”, a work from 2025. In a container of construction waste, she found an aluminium plate with traces of processing. Rivets, drill holes, a hinge and a piece cut away on the left-hand side. It is interesting not because of what has been cut away, but because of the void that remains: a counter form opens up the image and breaks through the straight, mathematical line. She suddenly sees its visual power, yet she did not search for it. Only when she has found (and seen) the startling shape, does she know what she was looking for. And she takes it to her studio, where she seizes the opportunity and, with a few interventions, creates a new image from what was once a discarded, “worthless” plate.

That is what makes the artist's eye so special.
In her painting practice, she never starts with a blank canvas that can be transformed into a world of paint from nothing. On the contrary, she always starts with something that already exists, with a history that is visible in traces of use that tell their own story. She looks around her carefully and embraces what is thrown into her lap, and then she takes up the fight. As if she has to tame what already exists and subject it to the laws of the image that slowly but surely appears before her eyes. Seeing the visual potential of found material is one thing, but confronting and connecting all those existing traces until a new and autonomous image emerges is the real battle. That requires interventions and twists and turns, it requires removing, tearing, cutting, slicing, it also requires waiting, putting things aside, and sometimes throwing things away and starting over. To quote Samuel Beckett: 'Try again, fail again, fail better.'

The vibrant, radiant work ‘In the Heart of the Matter’ (2023-2025) is exemplary of the intensive process through which a work is created. It began with a large piece of flag fabric that she came across in a second-hand shop where surplus stock from companies ends up. She combined this with a very thin curtain fabric, both fabrics in very distinctive colours such as yellow and orange. In these pieces of fabric, she recognises the transparency she admires in the paintings of German artist Sigmar Polke, another artist who uses the visual power of textiles. She immediately saw these fabrics as layers of paint that could become a painterly image, layers that could also be torn off or cut up, just as a painter can scrape away layers of paint. This process of removing, adding, painting over, shifting and pulling apart is a way of composing, continuing until an image emerges that is completely autonomous. Because, let's be clear, a work by Hilde Overbergh must never become aesthetic, nor a story. It must never resemble anything we might recognise in the world around us. Nothing in her work is what it seems. And if, during the process, a work threatens to become an image rather than an autonomous image, then it must be discarded. Uncompromisingly and without hesitation. Because a recognisable image is concrete and can be described in words, and for her that is stagnation. A work should also never be completely finished. A work by Hilde Overbergh is in itself a process, a state of becoming that she declares to be a fully-fledged work just before it is completed.

Nothing about her can be fully captured in words. Everything is open, everything is in motion. This applies to her way of seeing, her way of working, which is a sublimated form of trial and error, and it also applies to the result of that intensive creative process. Is it a painting, a print, an installation, a collage, a sculpture? Those frames are completely irrelevant to her. Where there is movement, there are no boundaries. As long as it produces an image that can stand on its own, a hybrid image, but always painterly.

Frits de Coninck, publicist and art critic