For nearly two decades, Rein Dufait has been making things-material objects that exist in the world as works of art or artist publications, following a process (sometimes lengthy, sometimes brief) that involves combinations of, amongst other things, sculpting, filling, stacking, building, cutting, tearing, tying, painting, rubbing, flattening, welding, cutting, sticking, gluing, composing, sketching, colouring, and digging. The materials used include card-board, sand, wood, plastic, plexiglass, acrylic resin, paper, paint, and oil pastel. The titles given to the works, as well as to groups of works and exhibitions, are illuminating, but only because they refer to the interplay between process and material-which is why they necessarily contain neologisms on a regular basis.

The results of these combinations of matter, pro-cessing, and naming ask incessantly, but without insisting, for contemplation, discussion, and description.

They stand between the viewer and the material world, not to replace that world, but to present previously nonexistent fragments of it. As unique and new objects, they set in motion the adventure of contemplation, as only works of art can do. There are no concepts, histories or preconceived ideas, save for the conviction that only physical things really exist. The concentration that is required is unusual and untimely, both in its possible duration and in its possible outcome. Nothing will be solved, rejected, or praised; nothing will be pilloried, denounced, or questioned. All that is asked is a disinterested interest, a fascination for useless objects, for arte-tacts without any immediate or indisputable importance, historical or current.

And then it begins. After that, the all-too-human search for associations, similarities, and references, and therefore also for language, for words, and for categories, may begin and be challenged. Every general, abstract concept is confronted with experience and looking. What we think we know is tested against what is perceived by the senses. At first glance, it may seem as though Rein Dufait has transformed from a sculptor into a painter, between 2018 and 2025, the period covered in this book.

Metamorphoses play a crucial role in his work, but only in regard to how form and matter can help each other change. Dufait's own approach remains consistent.

The art historical and art theoretical distinction between sculpture and painting is respected, but its validity is put to the test, and it is not taken as a starting point.

The difference between a statue and a painting seems obvious. Applying paint to a flat surface results in a two dimensional image that has almost no substance.

A painting is an apparition, something light' that loses its materiality and only emerges as a mental image. A sculp. ture is like a scaled-down version or a literal split-off of architecture-heavy, three-dimensional, and voluminous.

Like a body or a rock, it takes up space because it is wide and high, but also deep. A sculpture can be photographed, but the reduction is greater and more drastic than when a picture of a painting is printed. Every painting is much more of an image than any statue.

Within these definitions, Dufait addresses the problems and questions of sculpture. How can space be divided? How can different material textures be connected? How can volume and height be created, in spite of gravity? The very fact that these questions are asked is what matters most. The classic answers-understanding the statue as a reflection of the body-are no longer within reach. Sculpture, like art, is no longer self-evident, and it is precisely in this uncertainty that the opportunity seized lies. In the previous overview publication of Dufait's work, Things & Air from 2018, Zoe Gray concluded her text with a question, and with a short quote from the artist himself, taken from one of his private sketchbooks: That he will

is certain. "Yes, but how?"

continue to question his medium, sculpture, even further,

A possible answer to that question indeed lies in the encounter between sculpture and painting. Dufait questions sculpture by attempting to create it with painterly techniques. Or put differently: what looks like a painting is fabricated according to the principles of sculpture.

The answer to that question is never definitive, because every work is an attempt that calls for the next work. One such works was exhibited at Kunsthal Gent in 2019. The title of the solo exhibition, Holle volte [Hollow Fullness], presents a contrast between two concepts (hollow' and 'fullness') that don't match, even though they are presented as a pair. That presentation is exactly what it's all about. Kunsthal Gent is located in a former monastery, complete with a church. Dufait used several niches in the walls of this church, whose dimensions he made visible by partially filling them. For example, Kloosterwerk I:

Rif - met draaltekens [Monastery Work I: Reef - with Wire Drawings] was created, a variation on an earlier work entitled Rif, whilst panels with drawings were applied to the inside of the niche. Rif was created after a metal cage was placed in a box. The box was filled with sand and a cavity was dug out by hand and filled with plaster. This process was repeated several times, using a tilted box as a new context, from which all the panels were eventually removed. The result was an abstract sculpture with floating, sand-coloured, plaster elements. The green, grey, or black drawings on the 'inner walls' of this skeleton with shapes a body with organs-seem like distorted shadows or projections of the convolutions inside. Through the interaction with the niche, Kloosterwerk I: Rif - met draaltekens, becomes one of Dufait's most architectural works: the object resembles a model in which the organic and the geometric meet. At the same time, the niche functions as a deepened frame. Seen from the front, without the shadow effect, it can seem as though the cavity is filled, so that a two-dimensional image is created in the plane of the wall. Kloosterwerk I: Rif - met aradliekens becomes a three-dimensional painting, a framed view, or a cross-sec-tion that makes things and air visible.

In 2020, an invitation from the Permeke Museum in Jabbeke offered Dufait the opportunity to further test the depth of the plane. Once again, it became clear that taboos or dogmas played no role. On the one hand, this implied a refutation of rules regarding the medium-specific 'flatness' of paintings and the 'fullness' or spatiality of sculptures, as proclaimed in the post-war period by the American art critic Clement Greenberg. On the other hand, what was at stake was, quite simply, the sort of primacy of practice over theory, that was also recognised by Greenberg when he confirmed in 1954, for example, in the article

'Abstract, Representational, and so forth', that ambitious, major painting and sculpture continue in our time, as they always did in the past, by breaking with fixed notions about what is possible in art and what is not'.

A work such as Marine from 2020 might, in this regard, initially seem impossible or contradictory, both for art in general and for Dufait's art in particular. It comprises a wooden base, four metres wide and two metres high, wrought upon with acrylic, shells, plexiglass, paper, and sand. The work was created to be positioned opposite Permeke's Large Marine from 1935, and shares the same dimensions. Another similarity is that both works are 'sea views', as the 'marine' genre requires. A certain darkness, both in the sea and in the sky, provides another point of correspondence, lending both works a nocturnal quality.

Then the differences manifest themselves. For Dufait, the coast hardly offers any perspective-literally. His Marine consists of four layers: the dark blue sky, the black sea, the yellow beach, and a thin, dark green strip of land at the bottom. But rather than acting as the subject, as is the case with Permeke, these strips form a background.

What manifests itself against this background are objects.

Often, these are beach works' that Dufait created in situ in Ostend in recent years, many of which have since been lost. A version of Rif also appears, previously reworked' in Kloosterwerk I: Rif - met draaltekens, just like the early sculpture Wit bos [White Forest] from 2011: a distorted, white-painted piece of wood with green dots. What all these elements do, fundamentally, is obstruct the view of the sea. As obstacles-never entirely natural, never entirely manufactured-they make it clear that they are equally part of what might be understood as the sea'. Marine is a seascape that refuses to be one the illusion every representational painting strives for is maintained, yet simultaneously broken by drawing attention to objects that refuse to be flattened by the operation of perspective.

At the exhibition Strompelvast [Stumble-Steady] at the Roger Raveel Museum a year later in 2021, the encounter with Permeke and consequently the production of Marine-turned out to have set something in motion.

Have you been painting more since Marine, as in the series of works on cardboard?' Melanie Deboutte asked during a conversation with Dufait, in which Annie De Decker also participated, and which was included in the catalogue. His response was both laconic and complex:

'Yes, but you can't really call that painting. I do use paint, yes, to cover something. On some grids I've also started experimenting with something new: spreading out paint more expressively. I hadn't really done that before. In fact, it's always about letting new elements into your work, expanding the field, not narrowing it or making it smaller.

Paint is used as a material, but the same applies to the painting's support. This approach manifests itself in the series 'Landschaduw' [Land Shadow] from 2020, in which ink and acrylic are used on paper and wood. The fact that paint has a colour is used to emphasise the materiality and depth of that paint. Green (light and dark), black, and white appear to have a relief, particularly when juxtaposed. Paint, colour, and 'canvas'-the elements of painting-become the instruments of sculpture, creating objects that are mounted on the wall-and therefore have one front-but still attempt to create three-dimensional variations. The same applies to his grids, Grasdrocht [Grasstrosity] en Drangwand [Urge Wall], from the same period. The working material presented itself in the immediate vicinity of Dufait's studio in Ostend, at an industrial site with workshops where, amongst other things, designer furniture is stored. Discarded cardboard and packaging material were extensy, paintedrand: the frame was broken, pieces were cut away, painted, and reap-plied, or existing and new cavities within the grids were filled with composite. As Anny De Decker said in the conversation for the exhibition Strompelvast: 'It creates a completely different feeling, it has become a large object. In fact, all your works retain something sculptural, even when they are hanging on the wall.'

A further consequence of this method was the 2023 series 'Dynamoreliëfs: aardlagen en wandellengtes" [Dynamo-reliefs: Earth Gusts and Walking Lengths], displayed at the exhibition Samendrongende in Loods 12 in Wetteren. No fewer than 55 identical formats-hori-zontal pieces measuring 28 centimetres wide by 18.5 centi-metres high-form a collection of collages. They are numbered from 1 to 55, but they should be viewed together as a series of variations to fully appreciate their scope.

Dufait's works are not isolated incidents, but the result of successive trial periods in which the consequences of various parameters become visible through a process that IS Simultaneously conscious, rational, and intuitive. The title of an article by Johan Velter about this body of work,

'Conceptual bricolage', published in 2020 in De Witte Raaf, captures this approach well: there is tinkering, testing, and experimentation, but within a conceptual frame-work-a controlled process with a clear beginning and end. Together, the Dynamoreliëfs demonstrate a method or an approach of writing: strips of paper and cardboard are placed on a cardboard base (sometimes cut from the base itself) combined with layers of acrylic paint in green, blue, red, white, and yellow. Each collage, presented in a white wooden frame and behind glass, creates an irregular or disrupted grid, and collectively-albeit imaginary-the

55 Dynamoreliefs themselves also form a grid: an arrangement based on similarities-that immediately allows for and generates differences.

Vlotstaanders [Raft Dwellers] from 2024, exhibited at Binnen is het gisteren, buiten is het nooit [Inside is Yesterday, Outside is Never] that same year at Convent in Ghent, is a more monumental version of the Dynamo-reliefs-a large concluding work, over three metres wide and more than one metre high, which concludes and commemorates' an experiment, whilst heralding the next phase. Three existing rough wooden panels have been joined together and laid horizontally on the ground, forming a temporary footbridge or an elongated raft.

Once again, lines made from the composite Acrylic One are drawn directly onto the support, or the resin material is poured into moulds of wood and clay, before being left to harden. Due to its length, once hung on the wall at eye level, Vlotstaanders invites a slow walk, from left to right or right to left, whilst the object itself has the dimensions and materiality of a footbridge. During that walk, the entire theoretical framework of the differences between painting and sculpture, between flat paintings and three dimensional objects, can be reconsidered, without needing to reach any conclusion. What matters is that the viewer of Vlotstaanders is compelled to create a space, mentally and physically, by attempting to form a mental image of this painting, and by simultaneously respecting the material properties of this sculpture.

Dufait's most recent, forty part series is entitled Kartonkoppen' [Cardboard Headlines], and dates from early 2025. The material used is cardboard and these pieces are roughly the same size as a human head.

Kartonkoppen are also reminiscent of books, of closed books-with rounded spines on both sides that remain closed, yet whose contents are displayed on the outside, on the surface. This surface is, once again, neither literally flat nor superficial: on the one hand, it bears paint-the series is a sample of all the techniques that Dufait has tried out over the past year-and on the other hand, it features text and title: a number of words, sometimes one word, sometimes a complete sentence, rendered in block letters.

The Kartonkoppen are like a series of dummies, test versions, for this book, Dufait's monograph published in

2025. At the same time, they form a provisional endpoint of his approach to artist's books. After all, a book is another manifestation of the intersection between painting and sculpture, perpetually hesitating between the two-dimensional image (the page) and the three-dimensional object. As Johan Pas wrote in response to the collection Veraarde wrongellingen [Earthed Contortions], created between 2020 and 2022, Dufait's artist's books are in themselves manifestations of the sculptural process'.

This also applies to the Kartonkoppen, which can be held in one's hand like a book, yet cannot be leafed through. The fact that the covers of this most recent series always features a group of words also reveals another layer in the title, which can easily be misread as Krantenkoppen' -Headlines'. The headline represents the written essence of the society of the spectacle, summa-rising a recent, real event inadequately, with the aim of asking for attention and clicks-to gain access, in other words, to the consciousness of the reader, and of humanity.

Dufait's Kartonkoppen are of an entirely different order: they bear witness, like his entire oeuvre, to an incessant resistance against any possible reduction and superficiality of the material world. In this way, a form of attention becomes possible that can herald a different, new, and better way of being alive.