The Hans Op de Beeck sculpture depicts a bald, life-sized 11-year-old boy sitting in a cross-legged position, peering down at a glass orb he’s cradling in his hands. He’s propped high on a rock at one end of a very long, oval lily pond. Almost everything in this vast, artificial indoor garden, including the surrounding stands of bamboo and a woebegone girl sprouting angel wings, is rendered in the Belgian artist’s signature ash gray.
If you stand at the right angle at Delvaux headquarters in Brussels, where Op de Beeck’s enigmatic works were installed over the summer — some next to the workshop, others amid the benches — you can see handbag artisans hunched over their work in a similar posture to the boy, and with the same satisfying air of concentration.
A bespoke soundtrack of plaintive music leaks into the atelier, mingling with the intermittent sound of hammering.
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Here is a luxury brand-art collaboration of a different ilk: Instead of the typical capsule collection of merch, it leads with an installation worthy of a major museum or leading art fair, but offered first and foremost for the benefit and delight of Delvaux’s 150 Brussels employees, plus its worldwide business partners and VICs, by invitation only.
“We prefer not to sell, but to share what we stand for,” Delvaux’s chief executive officer Jean-Marc Loubier said of the unusual project, which he hopes will endure for about a year. “If we succeed, it will help people to understand that Delvaux is meaningful beyond the manufacturing, beyond the product — as a maison, as a brand, as a legacy.”
The ebullient and brainy French executive, whose love affair with Delvaux began in 2011 when he first invested in the brand alongside First Heritage Brands (it is now owned by Richemont), described a legacy that’s in motion: “We don’t preserve; we enrich. I think this project is part of that.”
Over an unhurried day of exclusive interviews with Loubier and Op de Beeck, a lunch of gray shrimp croquettes and visits to Delvaux’s private museum, flagship and leather storerooms, many parallels between the artist and the elite handbag maker emerged, first and foremost their Belgian-ness.
Founded in 1829 and an official supplier to the Royal Belgian Court since 1883, Delvaux spent most of its life as a company doting on the local market, exporting only 3 percent of its production when Loubier arrived: He scurried to get the brand up to speed on luxury’s globalization. (Today, 85 percent of sales are generated outside of Belgium.)
Meanwhile, Op de Beeck slips everyday Belgian objects and historical motifs — Duvel beer bottles, supermarket glassware, waffles and typical Flemish still-life arrangements — into his immersive installations, sculptures and films.
“I don’t even consciously put them in. It’s just what I know,” he shrugged.
No wonder Loubier was astonished and delighted when he visited Art Basel last June and discovered that the artist had casually incorporated one of Delvaux’s iconic styles into one of his disquieting, all-gray works: A woman seated on a tufted chaise longue in a ’50s-style dress, one hand resting on a fawn, a top-handle Brillant handbag at her feet.
Lo and behold, art dealer Almine Rech also organically chose that sculpture as the hero image for her big Hans Op de Beeck solo show, which opened Thursday night at her Brussels gallery.
“If I would have asked, they would have said ‘No,’” Loubier remarked with a knowing smile.
Op de Beeck said it’s the first time he has installed his artworks in a workplace, handing a visitor a to-go cup from one of his still-life works on plinths amid the handbag artisans. (The cup was cast in plaster, so it’s much heavier than polyester, his primary casting material.)
In an interview, the artist said he’s long admired Jacques Tati and ’50s aesthetics, whose markers include Delvaux’s bestselling Brillant. It was first unveiled in 1958 at the World Fair alongside the Atomium, amid the heady, postwar period of “naive optimism, a belief in progress, a belief in science, and I think today there’s so many reasons to be cynical about everything.”
By contrast, he argued that “art and craftsmanship are domains that we as human beings can still be proud of, whether it’s music, literature, visual arts, design or fashion… These are means and domains to bond, to connect, to find things in common, to share.
“As Jean-Marc says, ‘A bag is a bag.’ You could say the same thing about a landscape painting. But when either is done with dedication and inspiration, the ordinary becomes extraordinary,” he said.
Indeed, as a design reference, Op de Beeck puts the Brillant bag on the same pedestal as an Eames chair. “It’s at that level,” he said.
The artist said he connected easily with the ethos of the house, hinged on “a certain Belgian modesty” and tinged with playfulness and a touch of surrealism.
“There is also a sincerity and a pureness. Delvaux is not producing thousands of different things. It’s really concentrated and dedicated,” he said. “In my own installations or movies, it’s always about navigating the thin line between serenity, beauty and refinement, but then also humor, a bit of silliness and clumsiness or ineptness.”
While Op de Beeck works across multiple mediums, and in all colors, he is nearly synonymous with ash gray sculptures, films and environments. He acknowledges that gray can be read as a sad, even dystopian color, recalling the streets of lower Manhattan in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
He stumbled across it about 15 years ago when he added some black pigments to white plaster, finding that the velvety gray brought a silent, inert and eerily soothing quality to his sculptures and installations.
“It also has a certain anti-anecdotal aspect to it,” he mused. “My work is not about imitation. It’s about evocation. It’s about evoking a feeling or something which is underneath the skin of reality.”
At a time when so much contemporary art jockeys to be spectacular, Op de Beeck’s whispers, both commanding and requiring your attention. There are melancholic elements, including human characters that can seem lost in their thoughts — impassive and detached from the world.
He described “in-between” moments in life “when we’re not performing a social character… There’s this vanishing point, the moment that we let go of things and we are just part of the world without any further intention.
“I somehow hope that the works I create or installations I create invite you to have that moment of calm and solace and tranquility — and a moment of silent reflection,” he added.
Loubier hinted that the collaboration with Op de Beeck would include an installation at its New York flagship on Fifth Avenue that will debut in November and run through the holiday period.
The brand, controlled by Richemont since 2021, operates about 50 freestanding stores and shops-in-shop, expanding slowly and deliberately in pace with its exacting production standards.
Its Brussels headquarters in a former repair depot for military vehicles known as Arsenal has a hushed atmosphere — an oasis of calm and refinement in a European capital known for its jumbled architecture, tangled politics and urban grime.
Op de Beeck seemed right at home plunked on one of his polyester Chesterfields, observing the artisans quietly assembling leather goods beyond the bamboo.
“I feel the same need for calm and dedication,” he said. “There’s very little difference we can make in our lives other than putting dedication into what we do, whatever we do. I’m always aware that it is the little difference that we can deliver in this ridiculously short life.”
