Working with her has led me to feel that Sabine Wachters is a rare art gallery conductor who follows her impeccable instinct rather than calculation.
Her way is a perfect answer to the current unfortunate bureaucratization of creativity in the artworld and corresponds to the feelings and thought of the most advanced artists.
In this period of ours, art is submitted to two rigid rules: 1) the artist must produce predictable art; 2) the work of art is not seen for its visuality but must be supported by a verbal explanation.
A few of us consider this mummified situation to be a pathology that can be healed by a cure that will challenge artists and spectators to unconditional creativity and produce a welcome tide in market values no longer anchored to publicity and formulas but rooted in pure creativity.
A few operators in the field, like Sabine Wachters, have started to trust instinct and intuition rather than strategy. The first and basic reference in her approach is her subjective intuition, honed by years of study and attention. It is great that her newly associate son Xavier de Scheppers (who is also starting a new venture of his own, Art & Now, focused on young collectors) is following the same path.
I have been defined an encyclopedic artist, a person who seeks absolute sensibility by relentlessly leaping into experiences he doesn’t know, no matter which they may be. I trust that if I let it, if I don’t corral it, my sensibility and the culture within which I create will surface in my doings without even my knowing and the field of options offered to any artist today is infinitely open to do so.
I never take anything for granted, never rely on rules that censor the exploration of difference; I change modalities every time they become too familiar. I detach the single work of art from whatever predictable context supports it and I offer it in all its intrinsic power to the invention of the viewer.
Thus, it is precious for me to find in Sabine the exact counterpart to my way of approaching art. When Sabine is selecting works of mine to exhibit, she just simply ignores obsolete categories such as abstraction and realism and so many other binding definitions she could comfortably use as supporting crutches. Instead, like a hound following a scent or a Geiger detector looking for radiation she unabashedly hops from one response to the next for a few moments until she then quickly plunges into a decision. She seeks quality regardless of whatever contamination surrounds it.
Last month, I had a first-hand experience of pushing beyond the expected.
We nailed a large loose white canvas of 220 x 500 cm on the gallery’s wall and for three days I painted images on it in black acrylic paint. Visitors came and went while I worked. This kind of artwork is part of the cycle of my Crowd Group large murals I sometimes return to. They are extreme events in which attention is sharpened by a time limit.
I often paint accompanied by loud music, and I had specified that Sabine and Xavier could play J.S. Bach alternated to Rage Against the Machine. After the first couple of hours, I heard Sabine fumbling with all kinds of sound sources. What I had suggested was not enough for her. After checking some of my responses, she understood the spirit of what I needed and went far beyond any of my expectations. She started DJ-ing a most varied and global sequence of American native ancestral music segued into Baroque sonatas, then into Sufi sounds and African rhythms and so much more and Jazz from the more harmonious to the more dissonant. She bared my emotions and contradictions, and it went directly into the paint. Thrusting into raw intellect and emotions we lived a duet of high intensity.
Lucio Pozzi
