The flasks and gift boxes owned by his perfumier father take on a mysterious charm, as if hiding some deep inner truth within.
“He was fascinated by objects that had no noble life of themselves,” says Adriaens-Pannier. Perhaps this was Spilliaert’s way of showing respect for things which, like himself, were underappreciated or ignored.
In his bedroom, no doubt a place in which he spent many restless hours before heading out on to the streets of Ostend, he was inextricably drawn to a humble blue bowl. He gives it a luminous, effervescent quality, almost as if it is about to start hovering of its own accord. The bowl is illuminated by the glowing lamp of the lighthouse that shone out across the turbulent waters of the North Sea. The rotating lamp would have left his room in darkness far longer than in light, but Spilliaert seized the moment when this ignoble object shone and gave it a sublime, otherworldly beauty. Like Spilliaert himself, it was waiting for that brief moment of illumination that broke through the darkness.
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