Collecting: The Generalists Gentle Touch

A remarkable piece of book design by the hand of Tine Guns, in collaboration with Anne Fontenelle, is called ‘Silence, le Roi est mort’ – ‘Silence, the King is dead’, in which they have turned (recently) a childhood collection of clippings, into a tricolore threefold booklet using the real pantone colours of the Belgian flag. One colour for each of the three booklets. It is an angled publication with many layers for interpretation. The at that time still ultra young Tine made a massive amount of clippings to the occasion of the time of death of King Baudouin of Belgium. The booklet reflects, about 2 decades later, on the mass hysteria and the intense feelings many Belgians had on this departing. To many it must have felt as a goodbye to an era, an era of some kind of innocence maybe. The fact that, at his early age already, Tine collected these clippings so methodically, shows her generalist and objective interest in worldly things, later on to develop, into becoming the artist as which we know her now, still collecting, reflecting, cataloging and displaying… with dash and endeavour. (Peter Waterschoot)