M HKA Ensembles

Photography

Collection: Privécollectie.

It's a bit the approach Mariën, Magritte or Broodthaers have: the visual play with words.

JC: That’s true. Here, I am a prisoner of the Belgian tradition of James Ensor, through Magritte, Mariën, Broodthaers and all. It's stronger than me. But I don’t think about it! It's a disturbing phenomenon. I have the same attraction for vulgarity; I have the same attraction for being always bathed in a popular, provincial atmosphere; because that's what happens. You may notice that all these people have a kind of fascination and desire to stay in a very popular atmosphere... That's the Café du Commerce... It's weird.

Do you have an explanation for this?

JC: My explanation – that's my vision, mind you – is that everything is so silly in Belgium, [in such a way] subject to accident, to so-called surreal situations within the contexts in which we live, that it would be completely idiotic to look elsewhere. I live in a context so crazy from all points of view. There are things that never happen in larger [art] centres, it's so stupid and it makes me laugh so much that it inspires me. I'm sure Magritte, walking trough the rue des Mimosas with his little pooch – that he sees everything in the street. Ensor in Ostend, he is wedged into his street. When he goes to Paris, he falls on his face. He makes music, he makes his little things – it is only now, in retrospect, that I tell to myself: it's weird, this desire to always find a way round things, not only to counter the current, but to be against the artistic capitals. And if there is one guy who was against the artistic capital, surely it was Magritte. He had one hundred thousand reasons less than me to live in Brussels at the time he was making his paintings.

Yes, that's what really struck me when I arrived in Belgium: this anarchic, anti-heroic attitude, even in small family anecdotes. [In France] they are always full of panache, but here, nobody takes them seriously.

Irmeline Lebeer, Tableaux sans histoires, dans : Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, L’art en Belgique – Flandre et Wallonie au XXe siècle : un point de vue, 13 décembre 1990 – 10 mars 1991, pp. 412 - 414