As devastating as it proves to be, Willem Boel’s art nevertheless plunges its roots deep into a certain history, the current ramifications of which are among the most fertile. I am thinking here primarily of the Useless Machines of Bruno Munari, who, as early as the 1930s (in parallel to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs and Calder’s first mobiles) undertook to expand the field of aesthetic research in all of its dimensions, integrating poor and industrial materials into sculptural projects with an uncertain status, “the aim of which was to wag the tail of lazy dogs, to predict the sunrise (or) or to turn a hiccup into music”. As Munari would report decades later, his attempts to exceed art were certainly not crowned with an immediate success: “Almost all of [my friends] had one of my useless machines at home, but they confined them to their children’s bedrooms, because they seemed absurd and were useless, while their living rooms displayed sculptures by Marino Marini and pictures signed by Carrá or Sironi. Compared to a painting by Sironi, so profoundly marked with the seal of emotion, there was no doubt that with my string and cardboard, I could hardly expect to be taken seriously.”
Fortunately, being taken seriously does not appear to be Willem Boel’s principal aim, with him entitling an emblematic series of his researches “Sancho don't Care”. Cement mixers transformed into windmills by welding on fragile reinforced steel arms, supporting monochrome cloths, this flour mill does not fear any assault, being sure of causing the painting to turn indefinitely, in a noble and sentimental waltz in the image of those composed by Ravel, who opportunely prefaced them with this epigraph: “…the delicious and ever new pleasure of a useless occupation”.
Contrary to Jean Tinguely’s “meta-mechanical” machines, which release the painter from the tedious occupation of laying out colour or inventing a form (like a modern version of the tail of the donkey Aliboron, requested to paint a “Sunset over the Adriatic”, which has remained famous), Willem Boel’s single pictorial machines do not serve to produce art, but in some way place themselves upstream and downstream of the traditional act of creation. It seems to me that the bowl of the cement mixer may evoke the Duchampian chocolate grinder (and hence the “kitchen” of the workshop), while its overgrown arms, which monotonously drag the pictures, exhibit them to the gaze at the same time as they remove them from it, de facto pleading for the contemplative relationship to art, which is definitively old fashioned.
From this perspective, Willem Boel’s singular art, which is determined, visceral, engaged, brimming with a highly nutritious sap, even invigorating, evokes to me the discovery of one of the most completely penetrating practices of the end of the last century. In 1994, in Ghent, Jason Rhoades had indeed delivered a demented sculptural version of the extremely famous Triptych of the Mystic Lamb, preserved in the city’s cathedral. Unimaginably chaotic but governed to the nearest millimetre by a secret order, the terrifying and incredibly elegant and sophisticated shambolic pigsty of Jason Rhoades bore witness to an unprecedented capacity for ingesting and then returning the profound pictorial quality of Van Eyck’s altarpiece to the least nuance of the most subtle glaze or the most cryptic symbol, naturally with the most surprising thing being that this exercise in high-level mental and aesthetic acrobatics was achieved offhandedly by a nonchalant and flippant post-Punk brat in what appeared to many as a ramshackle reconstruction of a Lower East Side garage devastated by a whirlwind in an apartment. The exhibition was called: “This is the Show and the Show is Many Things”. This suits Willem Boel so well, who, by the way, lives and works in Ghent.