The shift from the material to the immaterial is most visible in ‘Never-ending walk’, a proposal, or rather, invitation, to the visitor of his exhibition in the Park ter Beuken to take a 2.8-kilometre-long looped walk through the centre of Lokeren. The city literally became the pedestal onto which the sculpture ‘took place’. Not in in terms of volume, but in the dimension of time, more an action than product. What fascinated Delabie was the cadastral map of the city in which all the plots of land form a kind of cubic drawing. A walk through a city usually follows well-defined paths: footpaths, pedestrian streets, pedestrian crossings, waterways, quays. Yet how many spaces do not remain hidden from the wanderer? Alleys, courtyard gardens, fallow land. Through an enormous magnification of scale, Delabie transforms a walk into a sculptural event and reduces sculpture for the viewer to the essential dimension of ‘moving in space’. The ‘moving’ can actually be purely mental: you don’t have to do the actual walk in order to understand the concept.

Hans Martens