OPEN SPACE, LANDSCAPE IN REVERSE
BY XAVIER DELORY
A renewed dialogue between ruin and landscape.
From a modernist office tower of the Glorious Thirty in a state of transient decay, Open space reverses the "classic" ruin / nature representation that can be observed in Flemish landscape painting from the 17th century. Unlike the "composed veduta" by painters from the north where you can see ruins of ancient Rome surrounded by an Arcadian landscape where nature and culture unite harmoniously, here the landscape no longer welcomes ruin, it makes part of the ruin. The mountainous landscape used, refers to the aesthetics of the sublime, giving a tone of confrontation between man and the forces of nature.
By introducing a landscape “freely” into this brutalist setting, Open space also plays with the relationship with nature, materials and landscapes, especially with the spatial continuity from inside to outside which was at the center of the concerns of the first modernist architects who wanted to put man back at the heart of "Creation" thanks to technique.
Bio
Xavier Delory, born in Liège (Belgium) in 1973, studied interior architecture and photography. His work is on the frontiers of art and architecture, questioning the characteristics of digital photography in its relationship to reality and to the construction of an image. The artist uses digital photomontages to create fictional architectures.
https://www.xavierdelory.com/