We know very well that art cannot be defined. Yet everyone pretends to know what it is or what it is supposed to be: it must give peace / match the wallpaper / red is beautiful, green is not / you must be able to see what it represents / all art is abstract / it must be contemporary / have eternal value / real art is groundbreaking / cannot be anything but elitist / must be democratic / committed / not fashionable – and more and worse, and all true enough. However, each of them is too small a truth to be called true.

When we all realize this very well, let us then say plainly what kind of art we like.

Art should rather not be funny, not ironic, not cynical. More precisely, when we encounter art of that nature, we especially appreciate it if, despite appearances to the contrary, it conveys something about vulnerability, melancholy, hope for salvation. Of course it is seen as quite an art to make people laugh. But usually that is not art, not what we consider art - unless that vulnerability and so on is an issue again.

Art doesn't have to be serious either. Severity is mainly for guards and sergeants: standing in ranks is serious and bars are particularly serious. And one by one and taking turns is usually horribly serious. One plus one is not to be messed with. All at once, on the other hand, is usually fun, although sometimes a mess, and sawing through bars is always fun and often liberating. But neither fun nor seriousness are the supreme qualities of art.

Art is also not sensitive. Speakers at life's great occasions are sensitive. Criminal lawyers are the ones with calculations. And comedians have to rely on the empty moments when they are not funny and witty. But art, even the art that seems to overload us with feelings, often of pity, of fear, of relief, that art itself is not sensitive, it is well made and therefore effective in terms of feelings. So art is, - finally a definition, - what is well made. But the decisive criterion for art is that it cannot be made: we get it. Art that can be learned how to make is what we call academic. Truly well-made art, all great art, has obscure origins and unfathomable skill. (In the old days they called that origin the Muse. Later psychologists spoke of the subconscious. And today we escape from real naming by calling it chance).

Art is only art if it remains marked by that dark origin and that unfathomable skill. The rest is academicism. Real art emerges from the dance of seriousness and escapes the trap of fun and the net of sensitivity. It has a barbaric strangeness and at the same time a visionary message intended for us. It is radiantly clear and permanently incomprehensible.

We live in a time that presents a stream of rubbish as art: all tranquility, heart-warming red, groundbreaking craziness, a pile of real stuff and a mountain of fake nothing. A few artists remain today, not many, who have an unbroken devotion to the secret origins of art. The portraits of Charlotte van Pallandt. The faces of Marlene Dumas. The reliefs of Schoonhoven. The drawings of Thierry de Cordier. The iron statues of Chillida. The works of…

…and now we suddenly see it clearly: the definition of real art, the work of art completely filled with originality, is the same as the names of a few creators. Art = Van Pallandt, and so on.

There are many additional things that can be said about Anet van de Elzen, who's work we are now showing for the first time. First and foremost, however, is the experience of its dark, radiant originality with which only a few are blessed.

Lambert Tegenbosch, april 1998 - published at the solo exhibition of sculptures and photographs by Anet van de Elzen at Gallerie Tegenbosch in Heusden aan de Maas