Manifesto

The dominant culture has learned to look away from certain forms because they exert an unease that ordinary aesthetics has no category to receive. The word for this zone is missing from received vocabulary; the suspicion of obscenity has nothing to do with it.

ÜGLY Sculptures occupies that threshold. The imprint crosses through the ugly as a passage, without claiming it as provocation. At the end of the passage, a denser presence appears, one that gives itself only at this price.

The founding gesture is direct carving. The work proceeds through subtraction and opening, sometimes through pure discovery at the chance of a cavity. The figure precedes the tool: it was waiting in the wood long before the chisel, in the found root long before the hand that recognised it. The sculptor releases the figure more than he creates it.

This conception of sculpture as revelation rather than manufacture revives an old thought, that of the bricoleur as Lévi-Strauss theorised it. The artist practises it in the present tense. He works with what the forest abandons, with the stone the ground releases, with the form the eye recognises in a root.

The corpus unfolds vertical columns, a handful of emergent heads, sometimes an intimate diorama. Sacred figures form a third register, rarer. Skeletons, animals, hybrid creatures surface from the wood with the evidence of things that were already there. In this grammar, the cavity operates as active volume on the same terms as mass.

The vocabulary matches that of commercial horror: skeletons, skulls, ghost vessels, troubled anatomies. The difference is precise and lies in the quality of the emotion.

Horror aims at immediate fright. Slow unease plays a different game: it settles, modifies the gaze, eventually leaves something behind. One recognises here the register of the contemporary memento mori, Flemish vanitas continued in a present vocabulary. Comfort has no place in it by construction.

The work converses with Berlinde De Bruyckere, Tim Whiten, Catherine Heard and Shary Boyle, in a register close to slow unease. With Alexander Calder, the kinship operates at a more structural level: a self-taught entry into the visual arts, a scale modulation that runs from diorama to monumental, a learned primitivism nourished by non-Western traditions. The central filiation remains that of the noble bricoleur in the Lévi-Straussian sense, which places both artists in the same family of gesture.