The Missing Painting Trying to Be

Proposal for Ixelles Museum / Brussels, 2023

Mark1

For the Ixelles Museum, I’m proposing a gesture that fits into the architecture, reflects the collections in its own way, and also finds its place in the daily lives of the visitors. I wish to intervene in an interstitial manner, with the desire, rather than occupying the space, to open up other spaces, to reveal a structure, an architectural memory, and to give voice to the artworks.

My proposal consists of two spatial translations of the museum's collection:

• The first one is a kind of ornamentation accentuating the architectural reliefs, which are the traces of a past structure. These visible lines on the upper part of the walls reveal, for some, the structure of the architecture of the temporary exhibition room located on the other side. The installation of mirror-polished stainless steel profiles on the corners of these reliefs captures and diffuses the ambient light, making the architecture dynamic: as visitors are moving around, they experience a kinetic reflection play. These profiles serve as the support for a multitude of colored dots, each symbolizing a single work from the museum's collection. The average color resulting from the reduction of each image to one pixel is unique, it's a quasi-chemical condensation of the artwork. These colored dots will form a network spanning all the walls. 15,000 colors, representing the museum's spectrum, the rainbow of its collections.

• The other intervention is invisible: it involves occupying the space through sound, marking time in the manner of a talking clock. At regular intervals, each hour or half-hour for example, a voice will recite a phrase composed from textual material taken from the titles of artworks in the collection. These phrases are created by an algorithm using the 15,000 titles of the works in the Ixelles Museum’s collection. Produced randomly from such a wide range of artistic gestures, each phrase can take on a poetic, absurd, dramatic, playful, minimalist, or surreal dimension, and more. Through their probable strangeness, the statements of this talking clock will reflect the abundance of the collection: here, an abundance of sounds and ideas, responding to the abundance of colors on the profiles. This voice will seem to emerge from the depths of the building, like an echo of the collections stored in the basement.

Conceived as a whole, these two proposed gestures are both translations of the collection, two ways of glimpsing it, of appreciating the diversity and profusion of its works. These are choral works; they offer a polyphony to be seen, a spectrum to be heard, and a constellation of works to be perceived as the museum’s collection. From the sum of works emerges a whole, fusing here while maintaining their identity, their colors, their singular words. In the various texts and discussions surrounding this call for proposals, I have often heard about the desire for an iconic work. What is emblematic about the museum, is its collection and its donations, particularly the first one from Edmond De Praetere, which led to the museum’s creation, and the others that have marked different stages of its history.

The space intended to host the artwork is a space of welcoming, reception, sharing, and circulation: it is the social heart of the Museum, where people are crossing paths, exchange, pass through, or stay for a while. It is a space that every visitor will access at least once during their visit. The specificity of this new space is that it has been completely cleared of its floors, stairs, walls, ceilings, and initial functions, to make way for light, volume—it breathes. It is not a space I would want to fill when it has been intentionally emptied; it has become minimal, a white cube but not a gallery. I propose that it remains empty, but connected with what constitutes the origin and function of the museum: its collection and its rooms. Taking the museum’s collection as the starting point of my proposal is an obvious choice, just as much as the spatial and architectural specifics of the space intended to host the artwork. From this context, I have developed my proposal, which seeks to reveal the collection by condensing it to restore its scale, starting from the database itself. Each work will be summoned in a glance, a word, a color, to give a sense of the multitude of works housed in the museum, without diminishing their uniqueness.

Mark2