Inside the thoroughly modern WE project
Family life and art conjoin in a modernist landmark. The Bulletin art critic Sarah McFadden was glad to be wearing socks without holes when she visited the Dotremont house
I went for the architecture. An invitation to an exhibition staged in a house designed by the Belgian modernist Louis De Koninck – a building I had somehow overlooked in a neighbourhood in Uccle which I thought I knew well – was an intriguing prospect, regardless of the art presented. I have long admired, from the outside, the houses and apartments De Koninck designed in the mid-1930s for the developer of the nearby Square Coghen. The buildings’ humble scale, flat roofs and spare facades are my idea of the sunny side of functionalism. The house noted on the invitation card, ‘a masterpiece from 1931’, was designed for a private client, the Belgian art collector Philippe Dotremont, and was bound to be of a different order.
Illusions of grandeur evaporated when I spotted the modestly proportioned house, whose modernist features, including a floor-to-ceiling bow window on the ground floor and an oval concrete canopy over the entrance, may once have turned heads but have long since melded with the eclectic mix of architectural styles found on this residential street. All over Brussels there are thousands of similar cases of exceptional houses settled comfortably and discreetly into their surroundings.
Like so many of those, the Dotremont house reserves its principal charms for its inhabitants and their guests. Once inside, it’s easy to understand why this is a listed property, and why it was the first modernist building in the capital to receive that distinction. You don’t have to be an architect to appreciate the surprising distribution of contrasting spatial volumes, the gentle infusion of natural light and the remarkable opening onto nature, even though the ‘nature’ in question is just a small overgrownback garden. What’s striking is the direct connection, visual and physical, between that patch of wild green space and the house itself.
How the place must have looked in Dotremont’s day, when it was filled with modern paintings, is hard to imagine. In 1961, a reporter for Time magazine was taken by the sight of 85 canvases just returned from a show in Basel ‘crowding the walls, halls, ante rooms and garage’. From this description, it’s obvious that the house was designed primarily as a family home, not a collector’s showcase.
Out of sight
Its original function is respected to this day, but the current owner, like the first, is a Belgian art enthusiast with a healthy disregard for the art/life barrier, if such a thing can be said to exist. Fabrice Rans runs an art centre in a converted textile-dyeing facility about a kilometre up the hill from where he and his family live in the modernist splendour (some may find this notion a contradiction in terms) of the Dotremont house.
Like Rans’s landmark home, his art enterprise, WE Project, fits seamlessly into its environment: you wouldn’t know it was there unless you were looking for it. To anyone familiar with the art world, off-the-main-drag obscurity of this sort is nothing new, nor does it smack of bohemian-chic. Who wouldn’t prefer a shop-front of the same size, if it existed, in the heavily trafficked Sablon? But it doesn’t exist, or if it does, the rents are out of sight, which is why contemporary art is most often shown in places you’re unlikely to stumble upon while window shopping.
Which brings us back to Fabrice Rans, who has set up his art space on an unprepossessing side street in Uccle. Recently, he invited Dutch artist Pieter Laurens Mol to present a double solo exhibition there and in the Dotremont house. Living with the art must be a pleasure: Mol has selected and installed the pieces with such sensitivity that they look as if they are part of the permanent decor, right down to the photographs and bibelots. Opening one’s home – or even part of it (certain rooms are off-limits) – to the public is another matter, so visits to the show are by appointment only, and visitors are asked to remove their shoes.
Like the Dotremont house, Mol’s work has been around for decades – since the 1970s, it has been shown regularly in Europe and the US – and all the while escaped my notice. I finally discovered it in the entrance hall of the Dotremont house in the form of La Salutation Bruxelloise, the first work Mol executed after moving from the Netherlands to Brussels in 2006. A response to the divisive socio-political situation in his adopted city, the drawing depicts two hands poised to meet in a friendly shake. Each hand bears the ghostly trace of the other in the place where thumbs and fingers would grasp if the two hands were to join in that elusive clasp.
“Brussels is an interesting melting pot,” Mol observed while giving guests a tour of the show. “Scientists have found that the conflict zones where two landscapes meet produce the most beautiful flowers and plants.” Tropes such as this crop up frequently in his conversation.
Back in the living room
The rest of the works displayed in the Dotremont house are from 1965 to 1975, when Mol was starting out as an artist, using a corner in his parents’ garage as a studio. “We were ten children: I was lucky to have it.” That early workspace accounts for the relatively small scale of what was created there, but the heterogeneity of that production can’t be attributed solely to youthful exploration. It remains a constant in an oeuvre which encompasses photography, sculpture, assemblage, painting and installations. “There is no stylistic or formal unity to the work,” Mol continues. “It’s about poetic implications.” Spoken by a dyed-in-the-wool conceptualist with a wry sense of humour and a passion for language, metaphysics, the mud of his native country and his artistic forebears.
Among the works in the Dotremont house are affectionate tributes to Rogier van der Weyden, Rembrandt, Mondrian and Brancusi. “It’s a vocation to say that these are masters of the modernist period,” he says of the last two. “I bring them into the living room again.”
ON VIEW:
A selection of Pieter Laurens Mol’s
work from the past 25
years is displayed at WE Project,
20 Rue Emile Regard/ straat,
Brussels, until December 11, tel
0496.81.21.33, www.weproject.be
To see Mol’s show at the
Dotremont house, tel 0478.71.62.96
Pictured above: Studio Prelude (Current State), 1998, Cibacrome print, by Pieter Laurens Mol
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