Honoré d’O

Born 1961 in Oudenaarde, Belgium / lives and works in Ghent, Belgium

The art of Honoré d'O has its origins in the surrealist tradition, which is particularly strong in Belgium. So he comes to the assemblage principle — communication through found objects. It is how, according to the pillar of structural anthropology Claude Lévy-Strauss, food gatherers of the Primitive Age communicated. Honoré d'O considers himself a gatherer of the Technotronic Age: he assembles images to construct a new content of figurative and symbolic systems. His works are route algorithms, itineraries in the global information flow, devoid of cultural hierarchy and leading trends; they are fragments of ceaselessly circulating images. 

STOP-SPOT

Icon 0: ©Community

Flemish Icons

2011

Mixed technique

Three of his works are displayed within the Impossible Community project: the Flemish Icons, a series of 11 assemblages intentionally scattered in different parts of the Museum; the Icon 0: ©Community, a glass sphere hanging in front of the Museum's entrance; and the STOP-SPOT object — a fishing line stretched from the Museum window across the whole courtyard. The author's comment on the objects reads as follows:

'An ephemeral TRAJECTORY of 11 elementary sculptures is spread out/over/through the museum as a levitated echo of something basic and functional as a metro line, to make the city working well...The cheap sterile industrial white materials without any art patina are composed into simple noble contemporary shrines. Their unsaid religiosity and sacro-absurdity embrace the profane conditio humana... Icons are stop-spots, operating in the awareness as junctions do in a network, or stations in ‘your’ metro... You buy awareness with attention. By integrating a continuum of these stop-spots in the reflection on (your) life, you’re turning your capital into fortune.'

'The Open Air Museum incarnates the global idea of infinite art. There is a tiny transparent crystal sphere hanging from the sky. The thread comes from an open second-floor window on the backside of the Museum building. By simply touching it, the spectator can send a symbolic message to the world. The thread goes to a tree of paradise, if one far from Eden.'