Pol Quadens
«Beauty is a matter of balance, but to understand it well, for beauty to provoke an emotion in us, that balance must be pushed to its limits; it must destabilize us, push us to our own limits of understanding.»
Designer and plastic artist born in 1960, Pol Quadens lives and works in Brussels. His aesthetic approach opens up a stimulating questioning of our relationship with the object of art in contemporary societies. Liberated from its functional purpose and reduction to utilitarian materiality, the beautiful object becomes, through the creativity of a gesture of purity that dispels the duality between gravity and lightness, a material to be contemplated. A deepened knowledge of the properties of metallic and composite materials has allowed him to stretch the horizons of the possible to the limits of resistance for pieces with lines and silhouettes in tension, of insolent and vibrant beauty. The artistic approach of Pol Quadens is nourished by a philosophy that illuminates a critical relationship with the world. The creator composes a work that poses an act of resistance to postmodern alienation and mirages, engaging the viewer in an introspective reflection.
Pol Quadens has designed pieces of design and fashion that have become iconic: signature furniture with suspended lines in balance, slender shoes with an invisible heel… Although some of these emblematic objects have been produced in substantial series, the artist is not content to participate in a form of frenzied accumulation. In recent years, he has instead focused on creating unique works and works for the projects of renowned decorators and the largest design collections worldwide. His pieces are regularly exhibited by design galleries in Europe and the United States, and are also offered for sale in auction houses, notably by Pierre Bergé & Associés, Piasa, Bonhams and Christie’s London.
From unique pieces of design to sculpture, evolution has become an obvious path for the artist Pol Quadens. The preferred material for sculpture is polished steel whose curves and volumes in mirror effect place the viewer face to face with the specular image of their inscription into a common world. The monumental sculpture series «Flint», which stand as witnesses of a deep cultural depth, features giant flint stones bursting with light reminiscent of the beauty of the earliest tools made by humans. The significant power of these sculptures questions the primitive creative gesture and original imagination in the face of the anesthetizing effect of the profusion of dehumanizing new technologies. One of his sculptures, Flint, is installed in a square in the commune of Woluwe Saint-Lambert in Brussels; this public commission has now been completed with a Circle Bench, a bench with slender lines in a circular motion that connects us openly to the otherness. Other «Bench» sculptures have also enriched the artist’s reflection, including the Cave Bench whose volumes simulate the entrance of a cave, questioning the subjective nature of the human being in the light of a Platonic allegory whose exegesis remains eminently valuable in order to guard against the ignorance that overcomes us as the prevalence of beliefs over the demand for knowledge is not lacking to manifest its symptoms.
Always associated with a philosophical approach that also takes the form of consistent writings initiated by the foundational texts, the sculptures by Pol Quadens return to the teachings of human history: the series of «Stones» is inspired by the cairns that bear witness to the initiatic journeys of humanity in its quest for meaning and greatness. The stacking that defines the contours of these Stones dispels the heaviness through the graceful vitality of an anthropomorphic being in the process of becoming. For Pol Quadens, aesthetics is a means of overcoming dialectical antinomies – balance/disbalance, gravity/lightness, visible/invisible – that the artist brings into tension in a movement of lines open to the reception of existential paradoxes as an essential living intensity.
After addressing sculpture through the monumental, Pol Quadens now works on smaller-scale pieces on the scale of this subjective interiority he continues to question. Sculptures tailored to the human form, intended to accompany these inexhaustible questions that punctuate our lives. Notably, the polished stainless steel «Flint» sculptures, which the artist calls «zero-degree material,» in reference to their ability to refract in a mirror effect. The faceted volumes of these “Flints” are certainly an aesthetic antidote to the uniformity and standardization that puritanism and the deployment of a formal universe devoid of the intricacies of our desires threaten us with.
