GESAMTWERKSTATT [1953-2021]: René Magritte & Jan Frederik De Cock

THE STAR OF THE FAIR ART at the Art Fair 2021 is for me undeniably Jan Frederik de Cock (dear Jan, I have also been adding this name, Frederik, to my surname for quite some time). Jan made his comeback, although he has never been away, really. He may have seemed to be less present for a few years while, after having received his Jeune Peinture Belge Award (2003), pursuing his international brilliant career in: Vienna, Frankfurt, Miami, the MOMA, the Tate Modern, Amsterdam, Portugal, Mexico, Baden-Baden, Berlin, Italy, Basel, Zurich, Tokyo...

Now at the age of forty-five, he is walking up to me like a different person. Not under the spotlights of a television format scene, but next to the giant cameras of an American film studio from the glory years. The charming youthful arrogance of yesteryear now seems to have made way, his boldness and boast having been replaced by his continuous elaboration on a vision, beyond fashion and the culture of spectacle. His famous installations with cupboards and drawers of fibreboard wood are now less blatantly displayed among his new Citizens of Calais, Jan's tribute to Rodin in the form of strange expressionist heads with mouths like holes punched in the skin to accommodate the stentor voices of pseudo-classical Greek actors, heads on gigantic pedestals - of age-old oak - a not-to-be-forgotten example of Jan Frederik's respect for Western traditions.

What Jan Frederik does with Magritte's salon is unheard of and unseen. He regards himself as heir to Ensor, Magritte and Broodthaers, dedicated to one great Belgian Gesamtkunstwerk, which, moreover, shows Wagnerian traits itself - but with the marked cards and sounds of irony and methodical doubt. There is no complacent dialogue between two internationally acclaimed masters, but rather one of two idiosyncratic speculators on the market of scepticism. These curious wan-Wagners evoke the false romanticism of Hollywood's glory days in Jan Frederik's recasting of René's salon studio - but the ruined heads are not those of Cary Grant and James Stewart, but the Proteus misfits that resonate as a counter-sound to chastise the new Puritanism that re-emerges again today, a counter-voice attributed to things by false experts with preposterous pretensions; and the compelling call to see and experience things as they are. And yet, this also remains a salon of magic, with the hollow laughter of the feast, with a seven-mile roaming tour through time and space; seriousness and humour with a libertarian hint.

Jan Frederik follows in the footsteps of Rimbaud: Je est un autre! And that other me is certainly not the “ganz Andere” from a worn-out theology! Mind you, members of the audience, I am carrying a bomb in my back pocket, I am the unconventional tenor of tradition and transmission reconciling salons with parlours, the arsenal with the workshop, love with fate (Nietzsche's amor fati), scepticism with thrust - and anarchy with arrhythmia. I AM THE PIONEER OF A DOOMED ABSTRACT CAPITALISM!

“Go and have a look, people, it is a dream like no other.”

Frans Frederik Boenders, 18th of August 2021