Quarantaine/Quarantine,
Honoré δ’O,
Published by Hannibal Books to coincide with the exhibition Quarantine: 40 Days in the Desert at MACS – Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium, until 10 May 2026.
Flanders in its golden age produced the painters Van Eyck and Memling.
Around six centuries on, the work of Belgian conceptual artist Honoré δ’O, at first sight bears no relation to his aesthetic forebears.
Born in Oudenarde in 1961 as Raf Van Ommeslaeghe, in his final year of studying architecture in Ghent, he realised overlooked spaces could be the context for drawings and images. To mark the shift in perception and approach, he changed his name to Honoré δ’O in 1981 and set to work.
Denis Gielen, director of Belgium’s Musée des Arts Contemporains, explains Honoré δ’O’s quest to create a tabula rasa, or void, emptied of everything that has gone before, in which the relationship between disparate objects can thrive.
There is nevertheless a connection with the earlier Flemish artists who painted the religious hermits who sought to distance themselves from the temptations of this world and achieve a state of spiritual transcendency.
Honoré δ’O spent his forty days quarantined from society in Marfa in Texas, a desert town that began as a railroad water stop and gained an international reputation for minimalist art after Donald Judd moved there in the 1970s.
The result of Honoré δ’O’s time in the desert is displayed in an exhibition at the MACS, one of Belgium’s most important modern art venues, set in former coal mining buildings classified as a UNESCO world heritage site.
“Nothing is ever intrinsic or permanent; everything is always connected with an exterior movement, whether at cosmic or molecular level,” Gielen writes in the book “Quarantaine” that accompanies the exhibition.
“Things happily abandon their identities for a less defined existence,” he adds.
The book brings together forty works in this vein, created from discarded and found objects and suspended between observation and imagination, stillness and movement, the playful and the serious, the ephemeral and the surprisingly enduring.
We encounter green flipflops, growing out of a desert floor like cacti, giant objects on landscapes created by 3-D printing and tragic corpses of roadkill given a new existence by being grafted onto apparently random objects.
Probably the easiest concept to grasp is the one that has become Honoré δ’O’s trademark: the sloping person, which he has positioned in various places in the world.
It was born out of the artist’s visit to Kathmandu in 2017, two years after a series of devastating earthquakes. His artistic response was first of all to build a wooden structure and visitors were invited to press their hands against a board in a sloping position in a demonstration of support.
The silhouette of this inclined stance evolved as a sign of recovered balance between hope and resignation, which you could interpret as the human condition.
Barbara Lewis.
Link to press photos: https://we.tl/t-gs2OxstTdX
Quarantaine/Quarantine,
Honoré δ’O,
Published by Hannibal Books to coincide with the exhibition Quarantine: 40 Days in the Desert at MACS – Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium, until 10 May 2026.
Flanders in its golden age produced the painters Van Eyck and Memling.
Around six centuries on, the work of Belgian conceptual artist Honoré δ’O, at first sight bears no relation to his aesthetic forebears.
Born in Oudenarde in 1961 as Raf Van Ommeslaeghe, in his final year of studying architecture in Ghent, he realised overlooked spaces could be the context for drawings and images. To mark the shift in perception and approach, he changed his name to Honoré δ’O in 1981 and set to work.
Denis Gielen, director of Belgium’s Musée des Arts Contemporains, explains Honoré δ’O’s quest to create a tabula rasa, or void, emptied of everything that has gone before, in which the relationship between disparate objects can thrive.
There is nevertheless a connection with the earlier Flemish artists who painted the religious hermits who sought to distance themselves from the temptations of this world and achieve a state of spiritual transcendency.
Honoré δ’O spent his forty days quarantined from society in Marfa in Texas, a desert town that began as a railroad water stop and gained an international reputation for minimalist art after Donald Judd moved there in the 1970s.
The result of Honoré δ’O’s time in the desert is displayed in an exhibition at the MACS, one of Belgium’s most important modern art venues, set in former coal mining buildings classified as a UNESCO world heritage site.
“Nothing is ever intrinsic or permanent; everything is always connected with an exterior movement, whether at cosmic or molecular level,” Gielen writes in the book “Quarantaine” that accompanies the exhibition.
“Things happily abandon their identities for a less defined existence,” he adds.
The book brings together forty works in this vein, created from discarded and found objects and suspended between observation and imagination, stillness and movement, the playful and the serious, the ephemeral and the surprisingly enduring.
We encounter green flipflops, growing out of a desert floor like cacti, giant objects on landscapes created by 3-D printing and tragic corpses of roadkill given a new existence by being grafted onto apparently random objects.
Probably the easiest concept to grasp is the one that has become Honoré δ’O’s trademark: the sloping person, which he has positioned in various places in the world.
It was born out of the artist’s visit to Kathmandu in 2017, two years after a series of devastating earthquakes. His artistic response was first of all to build a wooden structure and visitors were invited to press their hands against a board in a sloping position in a demonstration of support.
The silhouette of this inclined stance evolved as a sign of recovered balance between hope and resignation, which you could interpret as the human condition.
Barbara Lewis.
Link to press photos: https://we.tl/t-gs2OxstTdX
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, art, books, exhibitions • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, books, exhibitions