Het kanaal

Léon Spilliaert’s enigmatically symbolist landscapes more often depict a certain mood or frame of mind than they are depictions of specific places, and the present work is a striking example of the artist’s methodology - he translates a location into a visual metaphor of complex or supressed emotion. However, this scene, with its visually compelling dual waterways, is most likely a view of the so-called Doublecanal, the Leopoldcanal and Schipdonkcanal which run parallel to one another for some 12 miles, lying between the cities of Eeklo and Bruges before reaching the North Sea.
As a native Ostender this setting would have been very familiar to Spilliaert who occupied many of his early years making sketches of the Belgian coast and countryside. He also absorbed some of the philosophy of Nietzsche and the gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe while at school, influences which may have darkened his artistic temperament. Having then spent the first few years of the twentieth century in Brussels and Paris and exhibiting his art there, Spilliaert returned to Ostend and in the period when the present work was executed, he also produced a number of his most significant seascapes and landscapes, including Digue la nuit. Reflets de lumière (1908) and Vertigo (1908) - works which are correspondingly dreamlike and perplexing.
Denuded of most of their leaves, the slender trees in Het kanaal stand sentinel along both far banks of the respective canals, set against the cold and overcast sky of a northern European late autumn or winter, their seemingly fragile trunks reflected squigglingly on the wind-ruffled surfaces. Remarkably, these features occupy only the topmost quarter of the work while in the foreground a dark monochrome grassy mass seems to yawn gapingly towards us, relieved only by a small slither of curving roadway in the bottom right corner. This commanding feature is not painted uniformly flat, and its inky textural marks seem to quiver before the eyes and gesture at the artist’s psychic turmoil, intriguing the viewer as much as it disturbs them. Another work from the same period, Phare sur la digue (1908), is similarly dominated this time by a darkly sweeping seawall that seems to engulf the viewer in its nocturnal maw. In both cases, Spilliaert’s use of dramatic perspective is atmospheric and unnerving, both of them proto-cinematic in their Bergmanesque melancholy mise en scene staging and ambience.
Like many of Spilliaert’s landscapes, Het kanaal is resolutely peopleless, and the sense of isolation and silence it conjures is profound. Aside from the poplars on the water’s edges, elements which clearly indicate nature, most of this work’s features are ambiguous: the duplicated horizon lines, the banded linearities and the amorphous mark-making all anticipate abstraction while the absence of distracting human figures deepens the work’s meditative aspect. At another level, the work plays with contrasts, eschewing rich colour to concentrate on form, line, texture and the soft play of light. There is an almost mathematical formalism to the doubled watercourses, interspersed by the photo-negative of land, and the simultaneous mirroring of sky on their surfaces. Meanwhile the trees stand vertically separate from one-another and seem to underline the feelings of solitude and detachment that the artist has summoned.
The conjunction of the mysteriously brooding presence of the foregrounded land mass against the strict and certain order of the more distant and airy background seems troublingly unfathomable and somehow suggestive of peril. Spilliaert’s evocation of mood in Het kanaal constitutes one of his timeless and poetic contemplations on the push-pull of estrangement and belonging, the deep-seated dichotomy of the human predicament.