Without Horizon

Tijdsbeeld by Ignaas Devisch, realised in marble by sculptor Bernard Nachtergaele

In ‘Without Horizon’, sculptor Bernard Nachtergaele gives material form to a Tijdsbeeld by Ignaas Devisch, author and professor of medical philosophy and ethics at Ghent University. Where Devisch, in his thinking, examines the contemporary sense of hopelessness or lack of outlook, Nachtergaele translates this idea into marble. The result is a sculptural exploration of the moment when seeing itself reaches its limit.

The work approaches ‘horizonlessness’ not as an abstract concept, but as a bodily experience of vision. It is the moment when the gaze wants to move forward but encounters a boundary, the instant when seeing turns into no longer being able to see. The viewer’s gaze is drawn toward an eccentrically placed incision in the marble. What initially appears as a perspective or opening ultimately offers no view. The space pulls the eye inward while simultaneously depriving it of orientation.

Within this negative space, darkness intensifies toward the bottom, not as shadow, but as absence, a place where vision comes to an end. The dark marble plays a crucial role in this. The stone reveals itself as heavy, compact and inescapable, while at the same time being hollowed out and removed. In this way the Tijdsbeeld becomes a dialogue between thought and form. Philosophy, Devisch notes, has traditionally been aporetic, literally without passage. Answers to problems often reach a dead end, a wall, when everything seems momentarily without perspective. At such moments, the task is to reopen the space of thinking and begin to see new perspectives, to open other horizons.

Devisch’s reflection on the limits of our sense of time takes on a tangible form in Nachtergaele’s work. Without Horizonpresents horizonlessness not as a simple void, but as an intensely experienced boundary of vision, a point where the gaze, despite its desire for perspective, must ultimately come to a halt.