The taste of the apple … lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate. Not in the fruit itself; in a similar way … poetry lies in the meeting of the poem and reader, not in the lines of the symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.
Turn of the century Austrian architect Adolf Loos would not allow his buildings to be documented in photographs or printed plans. Loos believed that it was impossible to capture the qualitative aspects of the environments that he designed. He said "the sign of a truly felt architectural work is that in plan it lacks effect." He lamented that one could not smell the dust of the sofa in a photograph of the sofa. Edith DeKyndt, in her art, seeks to make us intensely aware of the phenomena that Loos found unrepresentable.
The work of Edith Dekynt deals more than anything else with the aesthetic act. Her research into phenomena is a search for a truth that exists in the invisible or nearly visible. In this way she approaches the infinite, absolute, and unreachable.[cold, dust, humidity, static electricity]. The invisible or nearly visible has a profound and mutable beauty that she seeks to uphold and make the viewer aware of.
In Deleuze, as in the phenomenological tradition, one finds the reading or description of reality as something that must be built, designed, as a process from the subject, as work to be done, drafted ...
While Edith's pursuit to apprehend often overlooked phenomenon is conceptually and theoretically rigorous, her strategies have the freshness and optimism of a 'student science fair project'. It might be that many of us haven't thought about the events that so interest her, since our childhood. Edith's work, and it is work in the real sense because she is so serious and earnest, is explored in a manner not unlike a scientific study. Clearly however, the work is subjective, her built description of reality. Again, her aims are poetic rather than 'objective.'

Edith is acutely interested in the individual viewer and their engagement with her work. As a result, her heightened perceptual inquiries may not engage the casual observer. Edith is seemingly searching for Universal elemental meanings. The work by-passes the sentimental or romantic and manifests a concern for site, birth of the viewer and phenomenological vision. This vision is concerned with how an artwork might be constructed to influence or reach the individual subject or perceiver. The path is often through collective 'windows' that open to the individual side of the subject. In this context, identifying these 'windows' becomes important. Memory, psychic apprehension, synesthetic experience and elemental sensations are employed in this context. DeKyndt aims to emphasize a visceral reception of art and focusses not only on visual, olfactory, tactile and oral sensations. And above all, the understanding of Edith's art requires a spiritual or metaphysical dimension.
DeKyndt's work is embodied by ephemeral gestures and unstable materials. She is most interested in the presence of the materials that surround us, rather than their representation. DeKyndt's work attains a transformational quality by allowing a profound experience of unstable or banal materials.
Edith seems to be searching for the 'Degree zero of aesthetic signification.' Her projects are intentionally reductive to the point that any further reduction would render their collapse. Her work is primarily based on abstraction [water freezing] and the opening of the point of signification by slight ephemeral gestures that the subject is incapable of eliminating.It is this descent into the foundations of individual experience that philosopher, Eugenio Trias refers to as 'The logic of the limit'. Architectural theorist, Ignasi de Sola Morales describes it as "the most fragile but surest path leading back to an encounter with the profound aesthetic experience."

*Borges, Jorge Luis. Forward to Obra Poetica, referenced from An Architecture of the Seven Senses by Juhanni Pallasmaa
*Sola-Morales Rubio, Ignasi. Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1997.: p. ix.
*Sola-Morales Rubio, Ignasi. Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1997.: p. 115.

Niel Minuk is Architect and Director of Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada.