Gabriel Lester,
Feedback
In 1995, on the d'Hoogvorststraat in Schaarbeek, Brussels, an almost antique VHS camera stood on a chair opposite a television set. In this room, where De Decker had piled up his possessions at the foot of his bed in an almost organic tower, one could view the young artist's feedback experiments day and night. The video feedback created magic fractals, and once seduced by this colourful, endlessly changing image, it was difficult to pry one's gaze away from it.
The simplicity of this experiment, almost too obvious to be taken seriously, but at the same time so powerful that it had a hypnotic effect, can serve as a very apt metaphor for the nature and development of De Decker's work. The strength of the work lies in the fact that he always responds to those things which fascinate and appeal to him - energy, form or content - with a direct and possibly surprising, but always obvious gesture. Feedback becomes a manner of working, where the information and inspiration from the material is recycled back into the material. All that is alive develops in that way.
In the years which followed this first acquaintance with De Decker's work, a clear development, or if you prefer, deepening and branching out of his work was perceptible. However much his extensive oeuvre may appear to be an accumulation of various ideas, feedback is always to be found at its roots.
This may be an immediate response to the material, where a simple stick or piece of iron wire is shaped into a geometric or organic object, as though its inner micro-structure was being revealed. It can however also be one of his many video works.
With the objects that De Decker produces or collects, there is not only the dialogue which the artist enters into with their form and content; there is also, though perhaps less obviously, a degree of introspection within the object itself. Thus the objects and drawings are not just products of communication between the artist and medium, but they also engage in an internal dialogue. It is clear that De Decker not only wants to make such work, but actively seeks out forms and materials that already contain this quality within themselves. Repetition, ramification, multiplication, mirroring and disorientation are thus recurring means that are employed, and precisely the artlessness, humour and diversity of these works reveal the self-reflection involving them.
One might see the artist M.C. Escher as a distant but kindred spirit - forms feed forms, birds form fish. But it is first and foremost the zero point, that is, the formlessness that embodies the feedback, that De Decker's artworks bear within themselves. Because there is always a sense in which for form arises from a form, concepts such as past, present and future fall away, and the images attain a sort of timelessness. The work reflects upon itself precisely in this state.
This is still clearer in De Decker's video works. The countless experiments in which he filmed his own eye with the eye of the camera are feedback avant la lettre, the consciousness that time disappears in a repetition of image. The eye here seems to lose even its symbolism and exist only as food for feedback. One could say we have here, in a certain sense, what the Dutch call the Droste effect, in the same way that the fractal is also an endless repetition of an ur-form: the eye that sees the eye which sees the eye which sees the eye...
A work which is closely related to this presents to us a mask of a laughing face. The mask laughs at itself, the viewer, and the person in the mask. The person wearing the mask is clearly audible, laughing back. This is all very contagious, so that many a viewer is caught laughing, thus answering the laugh.
The physicist Warner Heisenberg writes of the principle that looking always influences or changes the form or nature of that which is being looked at. For De Decker's videos, but also for his many drawings and objects, this actually appears to be the point of departure. That which is looked at self-evidently illustrates the influence of the act of looking. Observation shapes reality - and art.
