Raphaël Buedts : The Stairway to the Heart
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sculptures, the obtrusive shape of the tree disappears to make way for a personal transformation and frag mentation of the subject. Both Buedts and Penone are known for delving the core of the tree, for showing that they discover an essence, but Buedts sculpted the soul, or rather the crack in the soul. With his analytical method, Penone is diametrically opposite Buedts. As a friend, the luckless architect / artist René Heyvaert was of greater importance to Buedts. Heyvaert saw the self-evidence of his objects – which owe their form to the nature of wood, paper and card board – as the expression of the cosmic force that he was. The willow twigs stripped of their bark, the sawed tree trunks, the branches and sticks Heyvaert placed against the front of his house, the reduction of a tree to one branch : it is a practice that did not pass Buedts by. Both artists expressed themselves through intimate action drawn from the movements of the body and in nature. Heyvaert’s fanciful branches led on to Buedts’ Furniture for a Bird pieces, with their poetical, instru mental references. Of Heyvaert’s experiments with the assemblages of willow branches, Lieve Laporte writes :
This prosthesis [Untitled, 1976] attempts to improve on and, at the same time, assimilate the design of nature … This ‘super branch’ contains the key to René Heyvaert’s vocabulary and can be interpreted as a metaphor for the division between life and stylised life, between emotions and language, between reality and representation. On the one hand there is the shape of the branch, with all its subtleties and, on the other, the repre sentation of the branch stylised in such a way that its features are reduced to the essential.5
5. In René Heyvaert, Nico Dockx, Lieve Laporte and Jan Mast, eds. (Ghent : Ludion, 2006), p. 182. Daniel Vander Gucht writes in ‘Iedereen op scène’, in the catalogue for Un-Scene (Brussels : Wiels, 2008), p. 91 : “The label of contemporary art is even the result of an extraordinarily competitive system of selections, exclusion, and classification of those involved and of works of art claiming the designation ‘contemporary art’ ”. Buedts identified with René Heyvaert in the negation and rejection of their work by the ‘artistic scene’ in a certain period.
Stoel [Chair], 1982 Eik / Oak, 100 x 75 x 55 cm Privécollectie / Private collection
Stoel [Chair], 1982 Eik / Oak, 100 x 75 x 55 cm Privécollectie / Private collection
The work of Buedts and Heyvaert possesses a contem plative dimension. The modest, fragile character of their work allows them to visualise the roots of exist ence in rude fragments.