Tom Van Puyvelde, SLOW Festival, Concertgebouw Brugge, 2025 © Buysse Gallery. All rights reserved.
Last week, Tom Van Puyvelde graced the SLOW (36h) festival at Concertgebouw Brugge with a mesmerizing performance, intricately fading his meticulously constructed triptych. Accompanied by Arne Deforce’s live cello and electronic music performance titled ‘Spectral Shift, 2025’, the event was a profound fusion of visual and auditory arts.
Tom Van Puyvelde’s performance, which spanned the entire duration of the SLOW (36h) festival, showcased the deliberate and gradual construction and deconstruction of a triptych. This artistic process was not just about the visual spectacle but also about the slow, thoughtful engagement with the medium, which culminated in the fading away of the painted imagery. This act of disappearance, performed live, echoed the themes of transience and impermanence, resonating deeply with the philosophical undertones of the festival.
Arne Deforce provided a musical backdrop with his world premiere of ‘Spectral Shift, 2025’, a piece that explores the conceptual relationship between music and abstract painting. According to Deforce, “Spectral Shift arose from my fascination with the conceptual relationship between music and abstract painting: how sound, like a painting, can breathe and transform as a vibrating spectrum of energy and movement.” This collaboration brought a layered depth to the performance, as both artists explored the transformation and transience of their respective mediums.
Deforce’s composition, which moves through a landscape of sound without traditional melodies or rhythms, mirrors Van Puyvelde’s visual exploration, where the lines between abstraction and figuration blur into a continuum of shifting perceptions. Together, they invited the audience into a meditative state, where the flow of time seemed to expand and contract, enveloping the viewer in a sensory experience of fluctuating soundscapes and visual forms.
8 March 2025
