Houten lijst met tien onderscheidingen van Tonny van Renterghem c. 1945 - 1999

This wooden frame, holding ten awards belonging to Tonny van Renterghem, feels almost like a painter's shadow box, doesn't it? You get a sense of the formal qualities of its composition – a dark frame, a field of red, and an array of colorful, geometric shapes. I wonder, what does it mean to display one's achievements like this? It looks like a personal archive, a kind of emotional map that invites reflection on a life lived, choices made. I can imagine the collector, carefully arranging each item, considering its placement and relationship to the others. It reminds me of artists such as Kurt Schwitters, perhaps, or even Joseph Cornell. In the end, artists and collectors are magpies, picking up shiny little fragments of the world and arranging them into constellations of meaning. And isn't that what we all do, in our own way, trying to make sense of the world through the things we collect and the stories we tell?