Zo kon het zijn (It could have been this way) 2010

Marjan Eggermont made "Zo kon het zijn" (It could have been this way) and straight away, I'm thinking about process. Here, we have four squares, each filled with a smooth, almost industrial orange. There's a sharp line where the orange meets the grey, maybe it’s bare aluminum. The surface has this slick, unctuous feel. It's as if Eggermont is showing us a stage in a process, a kind of printing gone wrong, or right – I don’t know! Look at the lower-left panel; that angle where the orange sits on the gray, it’s not quite perfect, which for me, is perfect. It’s like the painting equivalent of a slightly out-of-tune guitar. It keeps it real. This piece is like early Gerhard Richter, the way he blurred the line between painting and photography. It’s as if Eggermont is saying art is about the maybe, the "it could have been," rather than any fixed outcome.