— Self-Portrait| 2001
Frank Theys

A man repeatedly paces between his computer and the window, headless, with blood rhythmically gushing from the open wound—a darkly humorous and metaphorical self-portrait of the author.

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“There is no escape from writing. But I rather don’t like to think too much about it. I took my coat and went out. I escaped to the MUHKA, where an exhibition opened about Belgian art in the nineties. For inexplicable reasons I was pulled to the left wing of the building where I saw the video ‘Self-Portrait’ of Frank Theys. I looked at a decapitated man sitting in front of his computer. Two squirts of blood were spouting from the neck, on the rhythm of the ever-beating heart. The blood was splashing over the computer screen and the keyboard. I put on the headphone and I heard the blood squirting. I was watching and listening and I saw myself, imperturbable causing bloody messes while strumming away one sentence after the other. After a while the decapitated man gets up from his chair and walks to the window, covering everything with the same red color. In my imagination the book of Auster and the video of Theys got stroked as two inseparable images on the two sides of a coin. If writing with Paul Auster is sometimes accompanied by an existential anxiety, writing with Frank Theys becomes pure Grand Guignol. The writer is a chicken without a head, squirting blood but indifferent, dead but still alive. Dear Frank Theys, I am going to call you and thank you. For one or another reason I feel much safer writing as a zombie chicken providing my pc with squirts of blood than the writer I am now once in a while, sometimes absorbed by fear about what kind of catastrophes I am calling up upon myself every time I turn on my pc. I bless you, cackling and gargling and forever stains on my cloths. Art can save your life.”

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Jeroen Olyslaegers (novelist)​​​