Column | Art is the best cover

I look for The Big HeatAn legendary crime from 1953. This month on display At Eye. With Glenn Ford, but especially with Gloria Grahame (the one in the musical Oklahoma So nice ‘I can’t say no’ sings – song from a young woman who rather kisses than is decent). And then it happens.

Occasionally, the old Dutch title automatically floops on that American website. Pouf! The Big Heat hot suddenly To the bitter end. It feels like someone from then, for example a cinema porter with shiny buttons, takes me by the hand and takes a moment to the great time that film titters were translated. And how. The Big Heat Is an indestructible film, but ‘the big heat’ makes no sense. In all its grimness, the Dutch title covers the load much better.

On the radio I hear in the program Never sleep again A conversation with Hans Op de Beeck. He has set up a landscape with realistic human sculptures in the Antwerp Royal Museum of Fine Arts, starting with a bubble-blunt girl. He sprayed everything gray, because white is so spotless, he says. What I don’t find an argument. But the whole hot Night journey. Then it is correct, the colors fall out at night and you are with that gray.

I think: I want to see that.

That is why I am now in the twilight and see that gray girl, with her eyes closed she blows that bell. It is not gray, it is made of glass, it looks like a light. She touches me with her innocence and I think: is this not sentimental? But: then it will be sentimental, what else?

Art is a perfect cover, especially for sentiment.

I foam around on the Beecks ‘Night trip’. It is not about the night, it’s not a dream world. Op de Beeck takes my hand and pulls me through his memories. The main issues shrink, side issues receive monstrous proportions. The gray soil and leads around the garden. That sitting figure is a tired boxer, oh, it’s a woman. That cat on your lap is a nude cat. In that cheerful carousel, skeletons. Does that child sleep or no longer live? That piece of cake is a meter high.

For Op de Beeck everything speaks automatically, he worries me with raw feeling by way of logic. I want to get rid of his grip. Not going. I entered, let go of all hope, stay until the end.

I am in Museum Panorama Mesdag for an exhibition, that Panorama I already know. Just look around a corner. Pouf! It is 1880 and I am standing on a dune top. I look around 360 degrees, see sea, beach, dune path, village, everything painting breathtaking. I thought I knew it, didn’t know anything about it anymore. I squeeze my arm. Find a hand.

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