Leendert van Accoleyen
Leendert van Accoleyen: building for freedom
Belgian visual artist Leendert van Accoleyen is an intriguing outsider on the contemporary art scene because of the deviant and, at times, acrobatic ways he devises as part of a different approach to spatial sites, nature and social imperfections. He studied sculpture and fine arts at the LUCA School of Arts in Ghent and percussion at the Conservatoire in Antwerp, earning a BA and MA at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Although he graduated magna cum laude as a visual artist, his contemporary art practice is all about humility. He expresses himself in fields, meadows and urban sites with utopian interventions as a mason, construction worker, tent builder, or tree-mover. A breath of fresh air on the artistic landscape.
Leendert Van Accoleyen always reaches for the impossible in his work, with gravity-defying structures that he uses to force beams, planks and other large and heavy objects into the air. He installed an army tent on top of a 15-metre-high structure made of iron rods. He only uses manpower for his interventions, eschewing cranes or aerial platforms. In another project, the artist attempted to give a fallen tree – which he found felled, from root to crown – a new and free life. Although the fallen giant conjures up ideas of decline and the end of life, the artist attempts the (almost) impossible, endeavouring to raise the tree again and even fit it with wheels. Van Accoleyen thus gives the tree a second life, in which it can do even more than before: move around, embracing adventure and freedom.
In 2019, van Accoleyen was invited to do a project at M HKA, in the INBOX space after winning the Hugo Roelandt prize. The space-filling work he presented consisted of a field of cobblestones, with each cobblestone raised above the ground with a wooden post. The artist relies on manpower only for his works, with all connections or interventions visible in the work and no hidden techniques or materials. In the accompanying text, Johan Pas likens the artist to someone who goes against the grain. "When I first saw his work following a mid-term assessment in the sculpture studio, it reminded me of Jean Tinguely's rattling anti-machines. If memory serves me well, Leendert knew little or nothing about Tinguely then. I wasn't surprised because Leendert did not always attend all my classes on 'contemporary art: neo-avant-gardes'."
Van Accoleyen's practice encompasses various media, including sculpture, installation and performance. His work mainly uses found materials and discarded objects, often referencing functional structures, such as shelters and studios. In 2022, he sought to devise an urban solution for safe shelters in public spaces for people in need. He found the most inconspicuous form on construction sites in public spaces, developing an artisanal-artistic 'disguise' in the form of pallets piled high with building blocks to create habitable hiding places. He then proceeded to create 'fakes' in his studio, producing moulds and casts of hollow pallets in which people could live and sleep. This idea inspired his show For Load-bearing And Non Load-bearing Masonry in 2022. He considered functionality, comfort and how to lock these shelters as part of the design. The building-block sculpture is social, radical and utopian, the antithesis of 'hostile architecture' - architecture that aims to make potential hiding or sleeping places uninhabitable.
Interestingly, Leendert Van Accoleyen always selects fleeting, mundane events to explain his revolutionary work. Once, he noticed a honey bee flying from flower to flower. Each time the bee landed on a wobbly stalk, it had to maintain balance. As it flew off, the stem veered up, and the flower stood straight again. This resilience is also apparent in van Accoleyen's work, who documents his art practice with photos of his utopian actions and masonry.
HW