Freek Wambacq


In its old sense the verb ‘bricoler’ applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shooting and riding. It was however always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle. And in our own time the ‘bricoleur’ is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind

Freek Wambacq’s oeuvre investigates the nexus between sculpture, installation and architecture with the devious ingenuity of a bricoleur, diverting the everyday furniture of the world for new and unlikely ends. In the tradition of Arte Povera, the artist makes use of readily available materials, bric-a-brac, remainders and leftovers found in his studio and elsewhere. His installations draw on DIY techniques and the aesthetics of old consumer catalogues and flea market displays (including that digital flea market Ebay), and frequently find inspiration in chance encounters and wayward discoveries. Lying behind Wambacq’s multiform objects are a tangle of different histories, sociological commentaries, and art historical references, which adds another dimension to their intrinsic aesthetic quality.

The artist’s sculptural technique is exemplified by his Rack series (2002 – present), constructions in which humble materials like pool cues, plastic tubes, ceramic pipes, wooden frames, wire, and glass plates are carefully arranged in appealing, even elegant, forms. Racks, stacks and piles are Wambacq’s preferred sculptural vocabulary—that is, collections of things whose individual placement is fundamentally unimportant or indifferent, like stacks of construction materials one can find in hardware stores. While maintaining a reference to this pure functionality and aesthetic indifference, the artist’s “rack” is no longer arbitrarily arranged but ordered by a distinct creative sensibility. The Racks might best be described as ‘paradox objects’. They retain a certain haphazard, improvised appearance while at the same time being precisely planned and composed—contingency and necessity combined. In Rack IV (2005), square PVC beams are arranged in a twisting criss-cross pattern, which connotes a sense of movement and gives the structure a slightly unbalanced, precarious feel. A few strategically placed ceramic bowls provide the installation with points of gravitation, while alluding to the layout of Shaker farms where bowls of fermenting milk are placed at the junctures of barn rafters.

Sociological and architectural concerns dominate Gravures sur pommes (2007). Here the artist makes use of a perishable fruit to depict the architectural outlines of buildings and public sculptures in two planned communities: the Sicilian city Gibellina Nuova, destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, and Louvain-la-Neuve, a university town built from scratch in the late sixties and early seventies as a result of linguistic quarrels that provoked the splitting of the Catholic University of Leuven. The artist represents these centrally planned mass produced cities in a delicate, ephemeral form, laser engraving their buildings and public artworks on the taut skin of shiny red apples. These souvenir ‘still lifes’, mixing in a remarkable way high technology and organic produce, ironically reframe the utopian ‘concrete dreams’—in reality, urban disasters—of these large-scale construction projects.

Wambacq’s practice often begins from a fortuitous perception of what can be called the ‘spontaneous aesthetics of everyday life’. This is most strikingly the case in Bent (2006-2007), a series of twisted, doodle-like metal ribbon sculptures. The particular form derives from the performances of John Massis (real name Wilfried Morbee), the “Belgian Hercules,” a strongman who was largely ignored in his own country but won a number of Guinness World Records entries in the 1960s and 70s for his amazing stunts. One of these involved bending metal ribbons with his teeth. For Massis and his audience, what counted, of course, was the display of superhuman strength; what fascinates the artist, however, is the unintentional artistic production, the creation of sculptures as a by-product of the Flemish bruiser’s impressive circus feats. Through this unexpected perspective shift, Massis’s performances become the principle for the creation of a new work.

Rocaille can be understood as deriving from a similar logic. An impressively large pile of seashells atop a blue plastic tarp, like a massive deposit from some seaside resort, Rocaille was first suggested by an image found on Ebay of shells on sale as construction material. This deceptively simple work, however, harbors a whole wealth of interpretations. Rocaille alludes at once to the leisurely activity of shell collecting by beachcombers, and to Rococo-style ornamentation in which natural motifs like seashells figure prominently. The term rocaille was used from the mid 16th century onwards to designate fancy rock-work and shell-work for fountains and grottoes, and later ornaments based on such forms; the word Rococo derives from it. While connoting this history, the form of the Wambacq’s installation is based on something eminently practical: large quantities of shells that are used for garden pathways or building insulation or other construction purposes. In displaying elements of the landscape, the installation references 70s Land Art, while the arrangement of found objects evokes conceptual sculpture more broadly—one thinks especially of Marcel Broodthaers’s overflowing pot of mussels Triomphe des Moules (1965). In this ‘triumph of seashells’ the intricate flowing ornamentation of the Rococo style is contrasted with the shells’ more mundane destination as basic construction material. This bringing together of opposites, where the opposed elements are not resolved in a greater harmony but persist in their opposition, is a key aspect of the artist’s method.

It is often remarked that Freek Wambacq’s work is profoundly and even purely sculptural. Such an interpretation, while no doubt largely accurate, risks overlooking the artist’s attention not only to medium-specific concerns of sculpture but also to questions about exhibition, installation and arrangement. In Wambacq’s work what matters is not only the object but above all its mode of presentation. For his show at SMAK, Objets temporairement retirés (2005), the artist presented empty display cases and various materials left about the space that suggested that a show was about to be installed, or perhaps was just dismantled. In Half-and-Half (2005), the gallery walls were partially cut down allowing visitors to see over and beyond them. What is highlighted here is the exhibition context and, more generally, the physical and ideological framework in which things become visible. Described by the artist himself as “showing the plinth not the object,” these interventions reveal in a rigorously post-Duchampian fashion the architectural infrastructure of the gallery space and the conditions for mounting an exhibition. Macroscopic objects like Rocaille and Vase-entrepôt (2008), a monumental sculpture “between a vase and a pot” (the title is a wordplay on the French entrepôt, meaning trading post), literally reshape and redefine the space in which they are situated. In my mind, one of Wambacq’s most successful shows involved an intriguing curatorial arrangement of his own works into a kind of combination atelier, warehouse, and even entrepôt. For his recent exhibition at Netwerk, works were placed along a large wooden table that wrapped around three walls. The deliberate yet seemingly haphazard arrangement (apples scatted on a table, a few bent metal ties on the floor, a dog sculpture stuck in the corner) rendered the individual works less precious, open-ended, and highly approachable. This defetishized environment, in which one could tangibly experience the slippage between art and non-art, art and life, provides a fascinating model for how one might conceive exhibition making today.

It would be amiss not to mention one other aspect of Wambacq’s work: its dry, satirical sense of humor. A favorite of mine is the wonderfully absurd installation Tracteur sur mur (2005), in which it would appear that a tractor popped a wheelie and found itself planted against the wall of a barn, thus becoming an ‘accidental’ readymade sculpture. In Insomnia Iris (2008), the flower of the Brussels shield is made into an abstract Indian motif for inducing sleep: just follow the lines with your eyes, so the accompanying instructions tell us, and you will surely drift into unconsciousness. And then there’s that dog: Le chasseur qui chasse sans son chien de chasse (2008), an uncanny sculptural object part mounted dog’s head, part floating doghouse, part crouching man. Is there in this curio perhaps a hidden comment on the lot of the contemporary spectator, a hunter with a dog’s face who hunts without the help of his trusty canine? There’s no one left to guide us—we’re our own dogs now.

Aaron Schuster