GILLES HELLEMANS
APRIL 5, 2025 - APRIL 26, 2025
PIANOFABRIEK, RUE DU FORT 35, 1060 SAINT-GILLES
Texte français
Nederlandse tekst
Subterranean promenade
The escalators mark both the beginning and the end of my journey, a verticality that intersects with the horizontal path of my displacement. A transit—sometimes swift, other times forced—through tiled and cemented corridors. The metro stations reveal themselves as giant architectural models, buried beneath the earth.
Behind panels, through half-open doors, I see hidden spaces for storage and maintenance - windowless workspaces. Walls that meet the earth, foundations, underground rivers and a biotope unknown to me. There’s no scent of humus here. Flashing lights—day, night, neon—cut through the obscurity, where the metro vanishes and reappears. An extension of the city, where it’s hard to imagine what lies above my head. I take the wrong exits, the wrong turns, even in stations I thought I knew.
And then, I slow down. I wouldn’t have done so without Gilles Hellemans. Underground architecture is that of circulation, not of pause
Undergoing, Under-going. To endure, to go beneath.
The rhythm of the metro amplifies the sensation of deceleration. I scan the walls, the corners, the perspectives, the joints, the broken tiles and the replaced seats. I do not ignore human beings, but my gaze adopts the temporality of infrastructures.
I remember a 2020 video, Skimming Stones (after twenty degrees), filmed at the Alma metro station. Dressed in a blue overall, Hellemans extends his arms toward an alcove with wooden benches. The soundtrack sings “I’ll take care of you. Would you take care of me?” I still wonder who is speaking. Are the benches offering their devotion, hoping, in return, for gentleness? Or is the artist soothing the public furniture, in exchange for some comfort?
It's not like as if I’m engaging in an anthropomorphic conversation with STIB-MIVB’s equipment. But my body starts to perceive more clearly the intentions that govern the diagonal placement of the tiles at the station Hôtel des Monnaies or the rhythmic alternation of red and white stripes at Porte de Hal.
I sense both the architectural decisions and the inherent power of the materials used. The delightfully geometric nature of tiles, the sleekness of metal and the shine of the plastic. I finally see the colour dynamic in the Metro Gare du Midi: a gray floor with orange décors matching the old metro trains, one floor bathed in dark red, and on the top floor, yellow. Colours with evolving shades. The yellow of the ‘70s is not today’s yellow. There is more lemon.
In his video-performances, filmed by Marjolein Guldentops, Hellemans melds with this familiar Brussels’ environment dressed in creations of Stephanie Becquet. In the Louise station his delicately woven arm sleeves contrast with the surrounding modernism. As if, from the solidity of the materials and hues, ondulating thoughts were emerging. A cold draft, between two galleries, sets in motion red ribbons added at the bottom of the artist’s t-shirt.
A flux of air that makes me feel the fluctuating temperature of the metro. Easy to maintain, icy surfaces, born from the collective warmth of public service. An uninviting shelter for the one with no homes but a shelter nevertheless. Dystopian settings combined with the tepidity of daily commutes. Hellemans’ installation - with its long bars and solitary seats turning their backs on each other - also oscillates between the sensuality of Italian plastic design, which embraces our buttocks, and metallic solitude. An altered modernism that turns white to gray, orange to brown, and yellow to beige. Like the graffiti, difficult to erase, that Hellemans showed me at the Horta station. The residual pigments have penetrated the granite, the writing, now barely visible, traces art nouveau spirals.
Architecture and its uncertain mutations. Hellemans returns to the materials and colors, as they have been preserved underground. Without nostalgia or a fascination for decay, but with an aesthetic pleasure, he examines how our bodies respond to these spaces—sometimes empty, sometimes saturated. I think of my mind, filled with digital fragments during each transit spent on my smartphone. Trains within my orbital cavities. How can I take better care of my surfaces.
Roshan Di Puppo