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The Sculptor as Craftsman
The Work of Rik Poot
One sunny spring day some time ago, I drove into the yard of Rik Poot's self-built farmhouse to find my path blocked by a larger-than-life bronze horse. And no ordinary mount but a Brabantine draught horse, a breed whose inbred strength and stamina make it extremely well-suited to pulling heavily-laden wagons as they used to do in the Port of Antwerp. A few weeks later Poot's horse stood with its slightly raised foreleg in the inner courtyard of a restored castle belonging to a famous Belgian brewery which saved the breed from extinction and also uses it as its trademark. This bronze horse is a textbook example of what traditional sculpture can be: the ability to handle the material with such skill that the work expresses, in monumental fashion, what an artist feels on admiring the animal's energy. In terms of form, it is a classically realistic sculpture which in no way smacks of formal experiment and which reinstates inspired craftsmanship. That is what makes it so daring.
This approach is typical of the sculptor Rik Poot who is now seventy-four years old, has seen and heard a great deal, has travelled a lot but has never compromised on the values he has so single-mindedly established and which he continues to uphold. He is a hardworking and skilful artist who has never allowed himself to be influenced by trends, fashions or schools. He has had no part in the peripheral phenomena of the art world, nor has he tried to find favour with gallery owners or art critics. Poot followed his instinct in opting for nature and everything associated with it, and he chooses animals and their behaviour as his subjects rather than the compromise behaviour of the average human being. Fittingly, he lives outside the city and is interested in ancient cultures which he has studied during his frequent travels. So it comes as no surprise to learn that he is not one of the pacesetters of the contemporary art circuit, nor a much talked-about figure in the contemporary art world.
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Monumentality
Rik Poot was born in Vilvoorde, an industrial town on the northern edge of Brussels, in 1924. There his father ran a small family company where bronze ornaments, destined for petty bourgeois interiors, were cast and finished. After secondary school (this was during the war years), Poot began studying to become a sculptor, first at an ordinary art school and then at the Academy for Fine Arts in Brussels. However, the standard of the teaching was not very high, which meant that the actual artistic training was of little consequence and the course consisted almost exclusively of craftsmanship taught in a traditional manner. Apart from Rodin, few sculptors' names were held up as examples and so it was Rodin who made an impression on Poot.
After completing his studies, he set up a temporary studio and married. A few years later he moved to an old farm where he built a permanent workshop. His first works were sculptures baked in potting compost, usually small in format and angular in facture by analogy with the works of the
Rik Poot, Brabantine Draught Horse. 1997. Bronze, H 245 cm. Diepensteyn Castle, Steenhuffel.
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Spanish sculptor Subirachs who was living in Brussels at the time, and with Zadkine whose monument for the devastated city of Rotterdam was proving quite controversial. In his years at the academy Poot had learnt that in moulding animals and plants the form or the figure had to be built up from the inside outwards. But now he worked the other way round, cutting the sculpture out of a piece of clay with a knife. As a result of working in that way, he soon became familiar with the ‘taille directe’ method of cutting straight into the material. He drew inspiration from his immediate domestic surroundings, the pets, his children, his wife. The works of that period are still fairly traditional, executed in rather angular forms or, in a refined way, going in search of the essence. As he himself admits, Henry Moore's sculptures had an influence here. But, clearly, Poot's isolated life in the country brought little contact with developments in the visual arts of that time, though he was aware of them because he made a point of visiting the large international exhibitions. But the feverish search of artists for ever new challenges inspired in him more scepticism than satisfaction.
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Deliberate gaps
His work, however, did not go unnoticed. In 1949 he was awarded the Godecharle Prize which provided him with a grant that enabled him to spend two two-month periods travelling abroad. First he went to France where he studied the Roman art in Moissac, Souillac, Autun and Vezelay; a second trip took him to the Italy of the Renaissance and the baroque. He went on working in between and made ends meet by producing a number of portraits.
One of the most striking features of Poot's work is his sense of monumentality. This manifests itself even in smaller sculptures, which also convey an extraordinary sense of space. Nevertheless, it took some time for the
Rik Poot, Naiad. 1990. Bronze, L 480 cm. Courthouse, Turnhout.
Rik Poot, Youth. 1976. Silver, H 32 cm. Private collection.
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Rik Poot, In the Sun. 1976. Bronze, H 50 cm. Private collection.
Rik Poot, Moving Figures. 1973. Silver, H 6 cm. Private collection.
sculptor to find his own idiom. Similarities with the work of the Austrian Wotruba sometimes appear in his (Belgian) blue stone sculptures and affinities with the Spaniard Julio Gonzalez are apparent in his iron sculptures. As an intelligent artist, it could not have been easy for him to make that uncertain period of experimentation productive. But it was really his tremendous willpower and belief in his creative powers that proved his salvation in the end. And the road to salvation lay in the lost wax technique which he had used earlier to design a Calvary for a church. It was in this technique, whereby wax plates are moulded and bent in the shape of the sculpture and later cast in bronze via a complicated technical procedure, that Rik Poot finally came into his own. He found that remodelling those rectangular wax plates was not always satisfactory when producing closed figures and, by experimenting, he realised that if he cut those plates in specific patterns he was able to build up a sculpture more organically. Openings appeared, deliberate gaps which gave the sculpture greater intensity because it became more dominant spatially and the monumentality more imminent.
With this he hit upon a new approach, and it was as if the real Poot was born. He had at last truly found himself and he could take all the credit for it. What is most striking about the innumerable small and medium-sized sculptures he has since made is the monumental effect created by the voids which are an essential part of the composition. It is as if the volume is expanded visually and the spatial effect magnified. The solid mass occupies space but the open parts add space and it is this interaction which gives the oeuvre its strength and grandeur, but also its individuality. An open form is created by manipulating the wax plates and by the possibilities and the limitations of this manipulation, unlike a closed form which is modelled in clay or plaster of Paris and which permits the sculptor to work from nature. That
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is why Poot's drawings play an important role, not because the sculpture is necessarily preceded by a series of drawings, but because in these Indian ink drawings it is almost as if he improvises with forms of light and dark which prefigure and synthesise the open and closed forms of his later sculptures.
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Craftsmanship
His themes - animals and people - have scarcely changed in all these years. He makes animals, and especially horses, because they are so completely natural and because they exude power and elegance, and he makes people, who in their nakedness become one with nature but also symbolise vulnerability or aggression, as some titles of works clearly show: The Ruler, Panic, Fettered Man, Ballade des Pendus in contrast to The Female Bather, Astonishment, In the Sun. His social conscience is reflected in his preference for the weak and oppressed and in his virulent aversion to potentates of every description. Only in nature and among animals, the living creatures that are closest to nature, does he find peace, the opportunity for contemplation and the silence he seeks.
Rik Poot is a highly-accomplished craftsman who has acquired great expertise with bronze by using the difficult lost wax technique, a long and delicate process, particularly when it comes to monumental sculptures, which he himself mastered by trial and error. Like all sculptors, he has often tackled the theme of Horse and Rider, one of the most difficult challenges a sculptor could ever be faced with. He did not avoid the challenge because he wanted to prove to himself just how far he could go as a craftsman and to find solutions to the problems of balance, gravity and the use of different forms. He executed the commission for the gigantic Brabantine draught horse, which blocked my path to his home and studio, in vigorous form. Poot is a classical sculptor who has remained true to himself and to his craft, a man of nature who has found happiness in his métier.
ludo bekkers
Translated by Alison Mouthaan-Gwillim.
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Rik Poot, Blood Donor. 1988. Bronze, H 140 cm. St Jan's Hospital, Genk.
Rik Poot, Horseman of the Apocalypse (Famine). 1988. Bronze, H 110 cm. Gruuthusemuseum, Bruges.
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