In Antwerp, the artist Hans op de Beeck created a world between dog and wolf

In order to feel all the enchantment that this exhibition generates, it must be browsed in one direction, then in the other, on tiptoe, following the stone path drawn between walls lined with bamboo. Host of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, the temple of the great Flemish masters who has the intelligence to open up to contemporary artists, the Hans Op plastic artist of Beeck, 56, invites the visitor to a “night trip”, confusing and bewitching, over a dozen rooms plunged into dark music. We must conceive of this visit as a slow step walk, under a starry sky, among plaster works of a pale and uniform gray: to remove the color was, for the artist, a means of “Facilitate understanding of the essence and timelessness of things”. “Gray moves away from realism to favor the evocation of a mood”he explains.

The artist, born in Turnhout, in the province of Antwerp, who works in Anderlecht, in the Brussels region, has given up the dating of his productions, their titration, to the description of the materials used, and to any explanation in fact. His 39 sculptures and installations, tiny or giant, make up a dreamlike world that the visitor will interpret as he sees fit. OP of Beeck wanted to make this walk an invitation launched to everyone so that he builds his own story apart from figures and strange or banal objects, surprising or daily.

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