As an indefatigable aesthete, Pol Quadens draws the contours of a world where the «commodity,» the fetish of transactional ugliness, has been eliminated, ousted by the beauty of the object. As Kant wrote to set limits to extensive commodification, «Everything either has a price or has dignity,» Pol Quadens might say «either a price or a beauty.» Sublimating matter is a drive that comes from his childhood, a way of entering the world, becoming a man, in the transmission of a pride to conceive and manufacture beautiful objects irreducible to their function. Born in 1960 in Brussels, he is the author of a work whose culmination reconciles design and art.
