Artwork
The central theme of this low-relief is two circle motifs on the platform side walls which look just like a triumphal arch (“Isjtar” is the goddess who gave her name to one of the gates of Babylon under the rule of Nabuchodonosor). Here the opposition is between open circles and squares and closed circles and squares in two tones. The five elements on the tympanum and the two panels on the side walls form a synthesis of Gilbert Decock’s works, which use a language full of imagery. Decock describes the development of the five part frieze as follows: “The square comes from the bottom left behind the open circles; it appears image after image, until it becomes a closed head motif on the right. This progressive movement towards the foreground offers the continuity of a cartoon. This regularity is however (consciously) interrupted by the strongly emphasised open window.”
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GILBERT DECOCK (1928 – 2007)
Gilbert Decock is one of the artists born between the two world wars who vitalised the geometry-based constructivist movement during the 1950s and 60s. The quest for a progressively greater austerity of means led to the use of black and white, dark brown and square and circle shapes which he used to create almost inexhaustible variations. His circle-square contrast can be compared with the opposition between male and female, day and night or yin and yang. Like many other artists of his generation, Gilbert Decock believed that the reduction of colours and shapes could lead to a greater elegance than baroque excess. But this simplification is only an advantage if it is the result of a process guided by a great feel for colour and a highly developed sense of shape and proportions.
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