Koenraad Dedobbeleer bases his work on a close and subjective observation of urban architecture and urban reality. The artist appropriates forms and objects that he comes across in his everyday surroundings, submitting them to often minimal alterations, either through the materials he uses in their re-creation, through their association with other objects and forms, through alterations in their scale or through the use of colour. His works are not readymades but subtle re-appropriations of existing objects. Dedobbeleer is interested in how an object or an idea can undergo changes of status and simultaneously exist within different realities and interpretations.

In the world of smells the same thing happens: the same essence can have variations depending on the person, the climate … it is at once the same and different.

The sculpture Doing What You Do can be interpreted as both logo and mask. It is a small piece of enamelled metal in which the artist has inserted, in a somewhat cryptic form, the initials of his name, a K and a D, and plays with the idea of the double. Each letter can be seen duplicated in the supposed upper and lower halves of the elliptical structure of the piece. The shape of the sculpture itself invites us to think of a mask with which to cover the face. A double game, both unveiling and hiding the identity of its author.

Are essences masks, like Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s sculpture?

Silvia Dauder