Dominique Stroobant
, Antwerp, Belgium
"As a creator, Dominique Stroobant is able to translate the questions born out of his curiosity into ideas and visions, which he then transforms into matter. His sculptures rise up from the depths of a creative spirit that might be compared to a quarry, having been built up from the traditional sediments of cultural and technological history.
The questions Stroobant poses and the solutions he finds might serve to classify his complex actions as those of a sculptor, mason, photographer, draughtsman, scientist, engineer or mediator — if such definitions were not precluded by the inspiring anarchic streak in his nature. He is motivated by the interplay of order and disorder, a search for rules within seeming lawlessness and the joy of originality."
About Dominique Stroobant
Art doesn’t have an essence. For me, the abstract term ‘art’ is associated with a dream or a drive I have. A dream of something I want to make, so that I can see it and the drive I feel when I’m trying to solve something. It would be best to stop using the term ‘art’ entirely.
Excerpted from "Finding the Source: Dominique Stroobant and the Joy of Beginnings", written by Dirk Pörschmann on the occasion of Dominique Stroobant’s monograph published by Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation in association with AsaMER, an imprint of MER. Paper Kunsthalle, October 2015.
A good work for me is like a new word. I simply struggle over stones and words because what must come is and remains yet-to- be imagined or verbalised. The final presentation or verbalisation of what I am looking for is therefore not the shaping of an already fixed notion. In that sense I do not consider my work as facultative executions of fixed notions that were established long ago. It is only when there is hindsight, and during and after the act of making, that the notion becomes clear.