M HKA Ensembles

Drawing, 65 x 50 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK7465_M320).

Oberreichskriegsanwalt (Senior Attorney in the War Office) is one of the diptychs by Toon Tersas in the M HKA collection. These idiosyncratic diptychs are visually quite similar: the left side is filled-in with (calligraphic) text, the right side with a graphic image. The technique, washed ink on paper, is also the same. Nonetheless, they constitute no completed or closed series: each work stands on its own and different combinations are possible. Tersas sees a clear connection between text and image. Often his starting point is text: a newspaper article or something else he’s accidentally comes across in his reading, but writings of celebrated writers and philosophers are references as well. Then he ‘intervenes’ vis-à-vis the text, both in terms of content and form.

The artist also isolates text-fragments, combines them and adds his own, very critical commentary. In this way he prevents a too-simple understanding of his work: the viewer must take his time to decipher the works and to search for possible interpretations. Tersas himself says that he doesn’t want to convey a message, that he’s just interested in form and the letters’ line. And yet, the meaning of the texts and commentaries is crucial: form and content, image and interpretation are inextricably linked. Tersas’s personal history serves as the foundation for his recurring themes. His fascination for Germany, the German language and, for example, Nazism in the case of Oberreichskriegsanwalt, harks back to his period of forced-labor in Germany as an 18 year-old during WWII. Tersas wanted to lay the world bare, remove its mask. According to his widow, he lived “in a constant state of rage about the state of the world”. He vented his dissatisfaction with himself and time’s inexorable essence through his works. His working method (like copying by hand) is a very conscious reaction against the speed of the world we live in.