The Conceptor

The ITERRATION project has been initiated by Christophe de Landtsheer (°1960). He always has actively been interested in art, as a photographer, drawer and writer. Throughout his diversified career as entrepeneur, consultant and executive in various sectors, Christophe has always focused on general and performance management, and on strategy development and implementation.

Like any poet, Christophe de Landtsheer is fascinated by the transformation of reflection into language. This conversion reaches confines his philosophical education helped to point, and today he endeavours to explore these limits as a plastician.

By varying composition, readability and graphic and/or chromatic delineation, he attempts to evoke the ineffable representation of thought in the schemes, diagrams and models - in short, in images of conceptual sets that are inevitably arbitrary but essential to the establishment of any universe of discourse.

The subject matter of a first series of pictures (Iterration Zero), begun in 2006, are schemes and models applied in business management. The irony of these paintings incites very different effects on viewers. Some of them perceive the works as being "only" decorative or didactic, others discover a denunciation of the ideology of financial capitalism in them.

As from 2010 a second series of paintings is being developed on wider and more diverse themes, but on the same formal basis. The challenge of Iterration One lies in the representation of "visions of totalities," such as the psychological apparatus according to Sigmund Freud, the modes of language used by Henri Michaux, the quaternary structure of ancient thought, ...

Alongside the Iterratio projects, undertaken in collaboration with the painter Yvo D'Herde and under the alias “Teri Toria”, Christophe de Landtsheer creates "graphs", by arranging summaries of texts, semantic analysis, mind maps with various graphical elements. These graphs are at the intersection of drawing, poetry and essay. He functions as an "agent provocateur" of pictorial facts.

His creativity is undoubtedly protean and cerebral, and he admits his difficulty to depart from the, now outdated, Renaissance ideal of personal universalism - the ambition to touch everything, not gratuitously as a dilettante, but passionately, by wagering an existential stake.