“Fundamentally,” Belgian artist Philippe Van Snick (1946–2019) once confided to me, “my interest is in the unrest of matter.” Art, for Van Snick, was a means to address the inherent instability of systems, ideas, and objects—the volatility of nature and human life. Chance upends systems; sensuality upsets rationality. Starting out as an artist in the late 1960s, Van Snick combined an early interest in Marcel Duchamp and Surrealism with Minimal and Conceptual art’s radical questioning of the object. He turned to mathematics, studying structure, order, and relation through elemental practices of