“The painting that interests me the most is that which is linked to the spirit and to metaphysics. Painting is not an imitation of reality. It originates in the painter’s mind.”

—Carole Vanderlinden

Socrates and Phaedrus take a stroll on the outskirts of Athens, their dialogue careening across such subjects as desire, divine madness, the limits and possibilities of language, and the forms reality takes in memory and other representations. Among the claims levied in this text—written by Plato circa 370 BCE and read by artist Carole Vanderlinden nearly two-and-a-half millennia later while she made the oil paintings in Fragmented Thought—is that art cannot be reduced to the elements of its production. Composite elements like materials, techniques, and art historical conditions cannot account for each work’s singularity. Vanderlinden’s work, which spans and often combines painting, collage, and drawing, resists assimilation into any single genre or style. It nevertheless retains an immediately recognizable sensibility. The paintings in this exhibition, made over the last three years, advance her distinctive visual language of hybridity, ambiguity, and formal open-endedness.

Though her work is often pictorial, Vanderlinden is not concerned with subject matter. Her territory is the slippery relationship between form and content. Her evolving reserve of source material, which includes her own sketchbooks as well as literature and art history—particularly early modernists like Kazimir Malevich, with his evocative geometries, and Francis Picabia, who famously advised artists to change their ideas “like shirts”—colors her work without directly appearing within it. Through her intuitive process, references are alternately sublimated and resurface in new forms. Vanderlinden’s compositions are layered on multiple registers: associatively, through her embrace of cross-pollination and intertextuality; and materially, their varied textures built up from strata of often-visible marks. As Ann Hoste, curator of Vanderlinden’s solo exhibition Keep a promise at S.M.A.K. Ghent, writes in the artist’s first monograph Bad Manners (2026), her art “stems from a methodology that picks up, removes, plays with, and propels divergent contents through enmeshments, disruptions, and combinations of highly heterogeneous orders of images, signs, histories, and energies.” Like her influences, the connections between the paintings and the artist’s own life are subterranean, coming through in flickers once the work is complete; in her words, “as though painting was catching up with my forgotten memories and emotions.” Only after the pieces in Fragmented Thought were resolved did Vanderlinden realize the preponderance of “flowers, houses, and corners of villages where buried childhood memories resurfaced.”

Formal enmeshments and dissonances occur not only between paintings but within them. The bouquet at the center of Charabia (2023) at turns materializes and dissolves, its blooms evoked by broken brushstrokes in the same kaleidoscopic palette as the vertical bands comprising its setting. In contrast, the grisaille tones of the pot and tabletop seem to dislodge time, as if the image were mid-transition between black-and-white and Kodachrome. Vanderlinden deconstructs the grid into a hybrid form, at once a network of discrete marks and an image that coalesces. While the trio of structures in the foreground of Village (2025) share a united terrain and broad black outlines, their respective architectures seem irreconcilable; their arrangement in a purple field defies linear perspective. Delicate white lines haloing the buildings give them the appearance of having been cut out of other pictures and collaged into a new world. With Faubourg (2023), its title the French word for “suburbs” or “false city,” Vanderlinden proposes another means of signifying a collection of structures. Led by the title, a viewer could perceive an arched doorway, perhaps the rail of a fence, but Faubourg is all textured geometries, resembling a constructivist composition run through art brut. Led to Plato by way of Jacques Derrida, in turn from Bernard Stiegler, Vanderlinden chased a word—pharmakon, both a poison and cure—through an associative chain, finding resonance in her practice with “the idea that a word can encompass two opposites.” She notes: “Painting is, for me, at once a poison and a remedy.” In art, disparate representations can exist side by side. Rather than negating each other, the divergent images in Vanderlinden’s work produce a freer, richer field of meaning.