51 Shapes of Nits: The forty-eighth shape is the football

Ceci n’est pas une Forme: Everyday Surrealism in Mum’s Livingroom

Now “J.O.S. Days” is not really a song that one would classify as surrealist. Although when you watch the videoclip that Nits made to accompany the song, certain surrealist traits seem to appear out of nowhere. There’s the football of course … but is it really only a football? The white object behaves itself in a very peculiar, unordinary way. It takes on the shape of those mysterious white orbs that figure abundantly in the work of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte or even in the work of fellow surrealist Paul Delvaux. All eyes are fixed on this strange football which Henk has then proudly sit on his lap, sitting next to his mum who is peeling potatoes. Lots of props from famous paintings, subjects or objects of artworks make their entry in some of the scenes of the videoclip. Even the simple juxtaposition of Henk Hofstede sitting on the couch with the ball on his knees, with the image of the mother peeling potatoes is a very surrealist image. And then the shape of the ball changes into a face …

The ball is play, the ball is fun, the ball is a face, the ball is challenge, tragedy, history, mystery … war and peace, disappointment and joy, life and death. Everything is carried in this mysterious white object that looks like a globe, a celestial body; it is passed around, kicked into the room of a house, it shatters the window of the Telman butcher’s shop; the ball with the face is personified as will be the case with many an object or an animal in the Nits world. This simple white shape has the power to evoke the history of a small community in The Netherlands which can then easily manage to spread out over an entire globe as we know the ball can do…

Singling out this image on the couch of Henk and his mum, with the ball and the potatoes, you end up with one of the most brilliant, surrealist images that Nits created throughout their whole oeuvre! From the screen the ball seems to be shouting out to the viewer : “Ceci n’est pas un ballon”. It is a very homely sort of surrealism…

I happened to remember this odd connection while watching football during the early summer weeks. The Belgian Red Devils played their last group match against Senegal in the World Cup Football and they were playing in their “home” jerseys. No ordinary shirts though; the design was inspired by the colours and shapes typical of the paintings of Magritte. There was the blue of his pretty skies with cute white clouds and a soft clear pink referring to his roses or other pinkish shapes or backgrounds in his works, in a pattern of blue and pink footballs evoking the painter’s recurring motif of round shapes such as the sun and moon, the apple … And on the inside of the collar you can read the words: “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” – “This is not a jersey”. 

It is easy to see that Nits too often play with objects in a surrealist way. These things are of course first and foremost elements of everyday life, “but there is more to it…”, as Hofstede sings in the Henry Moore song “A touch of …”. The lyrical world of Nits has always “a touch of” the magical world of the artist about it. Nits take the shapes of reality and then the music lifts them out of their ordinary contexts into the mysterious world of music where these things are transformed, metamorphosed into elements that become objects of a playful scrutiny in a manner very much like what happens in the paintings of the surrealists or the boxes of the famous American collector of things Joseph Cornell. Nits are kindred material spirits of these artists: music and words transform reality into something else, are birthing a new reality, a musical reality unfolding like in a dreamy haze. Even the structures and shapes of Nits songs will evolve in this sort of “surrealist” way, far removed from the traditional logic of the composition of a pop song. Their later work will often bear the mark of a sort of automatic spontaneity in its purest form inspired by the moment, guided by the fantasy of the musicians far away from the logical way of things.

In the videoclip of the song “The Panorama Man” a chair and a ladder are taken for a trip along the streets of Amsterdam. The chair ends up on a rooftop with Rob Kloet standing on the chair waving to us. Henk Hofstede on top of the ladder – his cut-out shape filled with Magritte skies and clouds and the colour blue – is also waving at us. The chair and the ladder seem to offer a wide panoramic view on city and life. I even sensed some sort of political message in the way Nits use forms and colours in this clip. A surreal blend which leaves room for a multitude of stories and meanings … or not … and perhaps just a playful mix of oddly connected images in a pleasantly surrealist way. 

The same fate befell a pair of yellow socks: the cosy memory of grandma knitting leads to an unexpected, uncanny atmosphere that will serve as a prologue to the recounting of the war time family stories of the Hofstede household, marching into a creepy ambience of dread and angst. Like so many ordinary objects in the world of Nits, the pair of socks quietly slips beyond itself.

In this way Nits have become masters of a unique kind of minimalist domestic surrealism. It is all very subtle and refined, never shocking. A cute and playful form of surrealism is an intrinsic part of the musical, visual and lyrical genius of Nits.

But then there’s one big difference with a surrealism à la Magritte. Even if Nits and Magritte want to evoke the mystery of all things in our world by way of a very precise and enchanted form of art, the underlying idea differs. Magritte entitled his work that features the pipe and the famous words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”,  “La Trahison des Images” – the treachery of images. These words suggest some sort of ill will of the part of the artistic images wanting to mislead the viewer and Magritte challenging the assumptions of the artwork. Nits don’t question the nature of their “representation” of the world in their work. It is a natural thing for them to do; there’s no existential crisis hiding underneath the songs they bring into the world. There’s no talk of “treachery” or” betrayal”; there’s only this “bonne entente” between Nits and the way the world ends up in their work, there is no discrepancy, no intellectual distance whatsoever between the world and the way Nits choose to portray life and world in their musical art. To Nits it all feels like a straightforward, joyous, self-evident process that needs no detached reflective attitude. Instead of treachery there is only a friendly, sweet connivance between the world and the way Nits portray its shapes. They distill them with love from their Lebenswelt into their poetical world in an amicable relationship that defines their ways of being artists. Nits love playing with “reality” in their work and the process unfolds in good faith. There is no sense of negativism or pessimism, no deception in the art of Nits. The world and Nits form a good team, one could argue – even if not everything in that world is as good as it could be. To put it in the famous words of a former coach of the Belgian national football team Robert Waseige: “De sfeer is goed” – The vibe is good.

“J.O.S. Days” and its football were my first acquaintance with Nits. Now after all those years the song is still as fresh as Magritte’s succulent green apple. But beware the apple is not real – you cannot bite into it – … the football, on the other hand, is reassuringly real – you can still kick it…

Joke Roelandt, July 2026