It's all about balance. In every image Piet Tuytel (b. Alblasserdam, 1956) searches for the balance to stay on his feet. His sculptures are the buttresses of his existence. They are made of steel and are immovable in a position that is grounded. You can't get them out of place, although they always give the impression that they could fall on top of you. You must approach them with caution. If you go straight at it, you will be taken down with an outward cut. When he works on his sculptures, Piet Tuytel takes extremely heavy elements in a clasp and lifts them from his legs to move them and bring them into proportion with each other. His knees are no longer worth anything, but he still masters the martial art of making images in his head. His sculptures are trestles, wedges and plinths. They are struts and they form contrasts in hard colors. From the H and T beam he has created an alphabet of images. It is a steel script, a cuneiform script of our time. It sounds something together: weight and weightlessness, mass and void, matter and space, body and soul. His work is as concrete as poetry can be. The images suspend thinking and merge meanings. They form a unity in opposites. With Tuytel, however, the whole is never more than the sum of its parts: they fit together perfectly and when you least expect it, they kick you down. They are images like sweeping legs. After all the lashing and pulling, they elegantly lay you on their back: ippon. Piet Tuytel's sculptures make a point. Alex de Vries