Benoît Luyckx

No-one who has ever visited Sculpture Gallery Het Depot, and more specifically Villa Hinkeloord, can ignore the work of Benoît Luyckx.
A large Belgian bluestone torso sculpted by him has stood in the grounds in front of Het Depot ever since it opened, as a sort of symbol for everything Het Depot stands for. On Benoît’s website, this sculpture can be found under the category Architectural commissions: Grand Torse.
Loek Dijkman asked me, as the architect responsible for the buildings of Het Depot, to discuss Benoît’s work from an architectural perspective. However, I shall attempt to give a somewhat broader view.

In the preparations for the opening of Het Depot – in this case Hinkeloord – 10 years ago, I had the privilege to meet Benoît Luyckx in Belgium as we visited the site where the Belgian bluestone, also known as petit granit, is quarried. Benoît was working there at the time and he gave us a guided tour of the open quarry and everything that was happening, and showed us the stone he was currently working on.

A century and a half ago, the stone was for the most part quarried manually, using hand tools. Nowadays this task is carried out by enormous machines, and most of the stone is cut using diamond-tipped tools. This world is a home from home for Benoît; you can read more about it in the monograph that Het Depot published on Benoît’s work in 2005.

Benoît Luyckx works in the quarry as a labourer among the labourers. He likes the fact that he can concentrate on his work without having to worry about making too much noise, and he doesn’t have to constantly tidy up his mess, as the quarry is large enough for him not to be in the way and the work that carries on around him in all weathers produces far more noise and waste than he ever could.

Working on the stone at the very place where it is taken from the ground gives Benoît an affinity with the material and here he also discovered new ways of working with the stone that he might not have found otherwise, in which case the extraordinary works exhibited here would never have been made.

It was in the quarry that Benoît first encountered the diamond blade as a tool for carving the hard stone, which he used to develop his own unique visual language. It is this visual language that makes Benoît’s work instantly recognisable. On the one hand it is highly abstract, yet at the same time it can be very concrete. Particularly where his torsos are concerned, I think that there are very few people who would ask what they are: they remain instantly recognisable as torsos.

Yet Benoît continues to surprise us with his different treatment of surfaces, which immediately give a different feel to his works. Many of his sculptures are created using an angle grinder fitted with a diamond blade, in which the characteristic effect of the tool forms an integral part of the work. There is no other way of achieving this particular effect. He achieves ripple effects by cutting the stone in a series of small stepped parallel cuts; he cuts grooves into a smooth surface to create interaction between light and dark. Sometimes he cuts deep into the stone, and at other times he barely touches it, which enables him to create very different patterns.

The huge potential discovered by Benoît Luyckx in this way of working means he is able to work in many different combinations, sometimes creating a smooth polished surface on one side of a piece, contrasted with a roughly cut pattern using the diamond blade on the other, and sometimes creating a coarsely chiselled surface all over. The torsos in particular are evidence of Benoît’s exploration of all this potential.

The diamond blade has become a very important tool for Benoît. As he says, it enables you to work the stone without having to fear unexpected results. Using an angle grinder rather than a mallet and chisel enables you to eliminate uncontrolled forces that could cause the stone to shatter unexpectedly or to break at a place where you do not want it to. So the diamond blade enables you to create shapes that would otherwise be impossible.

It is fascinating to observe the development of an artist as he becomes more familiar with his tools and the materials he uses. You see new ways of working creeping into the work. I haven’t done it, but I imagine it would be possible to date Benoît’s work according to the methods he uses to carve the stone. The increased skill involved, the way he uses the tools, and the discovery of new potential of the material he is working with, lead to the creation of new and surprising results. When you look at his torsos, which are all so different and yet so unmistakably his own work, you are continually amazed at how many different ways there are to interpret this subject.

In interviews, Benoît himself talks about his fascination for the skyscrapers of New York and the geometry of modernism and how this has influenced his work. In many of his sculptures, which Het Depot has exhibited ever since its opening, this can be clearly seen. His torsos are evidence of his search for how to translate this fascination for the urban abstraction of architecture into his own work as a sculptor.

Sculpture is in a completely different dimension to architecture. Whereas the art of architecture, if you can call it that, is always subordinate to the client and ultimately to the end users, the art of sculpture is free to develop as it wishes, limited only by the properties of the material used and the skill and imagination of the artist.
The sculptor does not have to concern himself with such things as practical application, or the opinion of the beholder; the architect on the other hand is always limited by matters such as the schedule of requirements, budgets and building regulations.
Even if a sculptor is commissioned to create a work for a certain building, he always has more freedom in his work than an architect, even if the commission does entail selection committees, budgets and the surroundings where the work will be placed; aspects over which he may have varying degrees of influence.

Benoît, son of an architect, has create a number of works on commission for specific buildings, mainly in France. In these works, Benoît plays with rough and smooth textured surfaces, he complements the architecture or sometimes creates a strong contrast. His work is a form of commentary upon the geometry and the finish of the building. In this way he gives an added dimension to the architecture, because his ‘commentary’ forces you to look more closely at both the work and its setting.

The influence of architecture upon his work can also be seen in several of his sculptures on display in Het Depot.
One of these is Torse Martial from 2005. This work clearly shows the architectural inspiration. Of course it is a torso, as the title suggests, but geometry and the play of light and dark are an essential aspect of the work.
In this sculpture, he used the diamond blade to carve a series of deep vertical grooves parallel to each other. He then roughly chiselled out these grooves to create a rugged front aspect. The smooth rear of the sculpture is carved with parallel grooves at an equal interval to those on the front, but cut horizontally, thus creating a spatial grid. At the places where the grid lines on the front and rear of the sculpture intersect, a small square hole is formed which is precisely as high and as wide as the groove.

When this sculpture was first shown in Het Depot, it was placed in one of the windows looking out onto the beautiful lawn created and tended by Albert Zweers who is responsible for the gardens here. The sun was shining on the grass and you could see the bright emerald colour through these squares in the sculpture. It looked for all the world as if the sculpture was dotted with tiny green LED lights.

It is not only a beautiful sculpture, it was also beautifully displayed and I was lucky enough to see it at a moment when the light was just perfect. I stood and looked at it for a while utterly fascinated, and then I started to imagine how it came about, because even more than the geometric and maybe even architectural patterns you see, the way in which Benoît conceived the work and the skill and precision with which he executed it, is intriguing.

Just as in architecture, the play of light on a work is enormously important, and if it is done well, the changing light continually reveals different qualities in a space or on a surface. This is a particularly significant feature of Benoît’s work, because a polished surface responds to light in a completely different way to a matt, ground, cut or chiselled surface. All of these different surface textures in that single theme of a torso force you as a beholder to continually look at the subject and consider it afresh. And that is the beauty of Het Depot, that you can see so many of these differences alongside each other.

But... Benoît has made more than just torsos, and not all of his work is in Belgian bluestone. Besides his fascination for architecture, some 15 years ago he also began to take inspiration from nature, and in particular the world of plants. And here again, he is not seeking to produce a realistic reproduction in the literal sense, but he is concerned with a feeling, with exploring affiliation in shapes. Possibly he is looking to find a counterbalance in nature to the artificial in architecture.

However, in several of these works, Benoît has chosen to exchange the abstraction of the bluestone or other stone for bronze and polyester, adding an element of colour to his work. And I am an architect who loves to use a lot of colour in his buildings, as you can see in Het Depot, so this aspect really appeals to me. I can imagine that if you find your inspiration in nature, it is almost inevitable that you will work in colour, because the natural world, and in particular the world of plants, is a never-ending range of all manner of colours and colour combinations that you would not be able or even dare to put together yourself. So I am looking forward to seeing the results of this exploratory journey into the world of colour, to see what new combinations Benoît will come up with and the new world he will open to us. And maybe he will combine his inspiration from nature and architecture so that in ten years’ time we will be able to admire a whole new Benoît Luyckx exhibition in Het Depot.

Bas van Hille, architect.