Dick Berckenkamp

Dick Berckenkamp’s Wondering from the Beyond Words series articulates the process of questioning and searching as a tangible, spatial construction. The work captures that moment of intellectual openness in which thoughts do not just take shape, but actively examine and reassemble matter. Berckenkamp’s characteristic balance between impulse and structure becomes here a metaphor for a curiosity that literally wants to “grasp.”

The composition is striking for its powerful diagonal: a massive violet color space forms the emotional basis, onto which a real, board-like element is applied as a collage object. Through this use of physical materials, the work moves close to Combine Painting—a tradition that has been dissolving the boundary between painting and object since Dadaism. This “board” acts like an architectural placement or an investigative unit that breaks the gaze and anchors the spiritual in the physical.

The wide black arcs of lines swinging across the object act like searching thought-paths that explore the material, measure it, and relocate it in the process of creation. In this interplay, Berckenkamp evokes the image of a mind that does not just wonder passively, but actively analyzes and constructively expands what it has found. The vertical paint splatters and precise dark traces on the wood create a visceral friction between the lightness of the color and the tectonic weight of the object.

The raw, neutral background serves as a silent stage for this process of making and examining. The result is a work that eludes any fleeting observation: at once structural and improvised, firmly established and yet in flux. Wondering thus becomes an invitation to understand the act of thinking as a form of labor—as a vital force that constantly creates new realities in the space between the artist, the material, and the viewer.