Werner Mannaers

'There is another, larger impulse behind all of this layering and gaming and interfusing, I think. Art that merely tells, or that merely codifies for easy unpacking, is not art, and tends to be dead on arrival. For art to live - 'living' is an odd concept to apply to the inanimate, but it does, and you know it when you see it - it has to partake of that aforementioned density: in Mannaers's case, that adds up to a body of work that mirrors a life lived, and continues to live in itself. That makes for somewhere you can go when you do have the existential blues, and that might banish them through smartness and sympathy. And in Mannaers's case, it makes for an art that says: I understand you have things inside you that you can't, won't, turn into words: me too. Feeling too, wordless too, I made something that approximates, though wouldn't pretend to specify, the shape of one of those things. (The hot purple electricity zapping between two proxy figures in White Night (P. 47), for example.) Come in, and let's be alone together. (from Martin Herbert, Yes, No: On Werner Mannaers, in: The Scent of Mimosa)