Project in expansion VIVE LA CURATORIALE.
Ostend: sweet love and sour memories
William Sweetlove
My name says it all: English migration to Flanders in 1860.
When you are born in the same year as James Ensor died, 1949, in the same city, Ostend, where, as an artist growing up, you discovered the same contradictions and passion, you feel that James has crept into your subconscious. I remember when I was six years old that grandfather Sweetlove, as a war invalids and member of the British Legion, received a visit from the Lord Mayor in full regalia in his shabby house. In his valise, the English flag.
I have always had a lot of respect for militants in art such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Ben Vautier, Wim Devoye, Cindy Sherman.... each in their own time and I want to cut this thread now. They belong to me now as collectors items.
Now, I am making my own procession, not a clerical one but a re-evolutionary one. Carnival as an eruption, a caricature, a disguise and a subculture once in a lifetime.
The CCCs and Vive La Curatoriale
Are they Fosile flag bearers or will they be brought to museums in thousand-year-old urns from the pyramids?
They are preserved as fosils, embedded in unbreakable material" for eternity" .
Searching for a new life for my iconography in a procession that wriggles between the power and wealth of: les conservateurs, les curateurs et les critiques d'arts dans la langue d'Ensor.
It is a questioning of the structures within art.
From interviews with Baert André, Ostend 2021