You can view his drawings as the work of a human printer (humans created the computer in their own image): they are built up like paintings, layer by layer, with horizontal and vertical lines that gradually reveal a shape, a figure. Let’s say he draws the canvas on which he paints with all sorts of pencils.
He always works on the same formats: A6, A4, A2 because his work aims to be as universal as possible (after all, everyone deals with A4 on a daily basis). The reason he numbers his drawings as “History” is that he is essentially “drawing time” at a 1:1 scale. He draws lines while his own time and that of his contemporaries passes, an ironic commentary on “Ars longa, vita brevis.”
Johan De Wilde took part in the group exhibition (expo)nentieel at DeNode (2024–2025, curated by Hilde Van Canneyt).