"Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust – we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." (Albert Einstein, 1929)

Maaike Leyn’s drawings are made of dust. She rubs dry charcoal and pastel pigments into the fibres of rude canvas. Part of this dust remains, finds its trace on the canvas, other parts disappear and go their own way. The artist is like a piper which makes the dust dancing in a mystical way. But the dance of the drawing is also made by forces over which the artist doesn’t have any control. In her work, often comprising monumental drawings, the earthly material captures the essence of being or not being, disappearing.

The bare canvas, the dust of the charcoal have something rudimentary in them. She emphasises this the way she nails her canvas to the walls without frames. This handling with the material of the work also refers to the subject: About a world which is constantly disappearing and we can’t fix, only in our memories, but also the memories evaporate.

She shows a hotelroom, a floor, curtains before the window, stairs but the humans are disappeared. The drawings are triggers which make us remember vague places, occurrences, or memories from the past. In “hotelroom” e.g. she shows an old-fashioned wardrobe in which you see the reflection of a chandelier with three porcelain covers.

There are no clean lines, through the relentlessness of the charcoal, the drawing can’t grasp itself completely to the canvas and it forms a kind of twilight, a moment of being and not being, disappearing. (Maaike Leyn)

"Wondrous adventures with stark vectors, lines, charcoal, white oil paint, cut-and-past fragments of canvas or paintings – that is what Maaike Leyn’s drawings and paintings are. But they also conjure up worlds, or a world. So that we not only encounter pieces of work – with visual objects – but also a realm of thought, the vision of an artist; with the readable traces of the seeing and acting life of a young woman." (Hans Theys)