December 2024, Oil on canvas 80x80cm

The work draws inspiration from Menuet, a book by Louis-Paul Boon. Like a key, the painting turns around a single act: the eating of olives. It serves as a potent cultural symbol, long associated with desire since antiquity—and here, on canvas, it becomes the unreachable sensuality of a dance for three.

As Boon writes, in a moment charged with ambiguity and desire:
“…en de man wist dat hij tussen haar lippen en de lippen van de ander niet meer wist wie hem streelde, wie hem vroeg, wie hem eiste, en of het zijn vlees was of de zonde zelf die daar tussen de tanden glansde.”
(“…and the man no longer knew, between her lips and the lips of the other, who caressed him, who invited him, who demanded him, or whether it was his flesh or sin itself that gleamed there between the teeth.”)