In Gaasbeek, David Claerbout slips into the maze of time

Lennik (Belgium). In the heart of Pajottenland, near Brussels, Gaasbeek Castle is hosting an exhibition by David Claerbout (born in 1969), one of the major Belgian videographers and photographers. His works of great formal rigor are interested in the flow and perception of time and movement.

If the origins of the castle date back to a 13th century military fortress, the building as it appears today is the culmination of the major restoration carried out at the end of the 19th century by the decorative architect Charle-Albert on the initiative of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti. Passionate about art, literature and history, the chatelaine dreamed of a“archaic renovation” in the spirit of Viollet-le-Duc and a fantasized Renaissance. She had a fairytale fortress built, a setting for her impressive collection of works of art where she could welcome her visitors from the Parisian literary and political intelligentsia in a succession of rooms magnifying an ideal past.

Claerbout lives up to the place

Crossing rooms and corridors restored in all their refined details, the visitor is almost surprised not to come across the ghost of Marie Arconati-Visconti dressed in the page outfit in which she loved to appear. The integration of Claerbout’s works into the sumptuous decorations is appropriate.

The images of Long Goodbye (2007) (see ill.), projected on a tulle hanging in the kitchen, are duplicated on the copper frying pans hanging on the wall. In a slow, long zoom out, a woman serves tea on a sunny terrace of a country house and bids farewell to an invisible guest who leaves with nightfall.

In a small room under the stairs, Piano Player (2002), his first film which he was never able to show in good conditions, invites the visitor to follow a woman who crosses a provincial town on a night of heavy rain to enter a deserted house where a young man plays a crystalline melody on the piano which seems to erase the outside world. Through a subtle work on the sound, the piano is heard first, then only the orchestra which accompanies it, audible at the end of the piece.

With Claerbout, appearances are often deceptive as in Breathing Bird (2012), a small format double video, hung on the brick wall of the Charles Quint staircase. Two birds face each other on either side of a window. At first, the image seems fixed, until the mist of breathing and the imperceptible movements of the birds take shape.

The Woodcarver and the Forest (2025) is the unpublished work which awaits the visitor in a large room under the attic. With precise gestures, a young man in a checked shirt carves wooden spoons in front of the large bay window of a modernist house nestled in the heart of a forest of slender pines. Each utensil is then suspended among others which produce soothing tinkling sounds. The apparent simplicity and banality of this repetitive and loving gesture in a luminous environment contrasts, on the other side of the glass, with the impenetrable mass of the forest which gives its woody flesh to create objects whose utility is as futile as it is essential. At times, the camera ventures between the thorn bushes, and the silence of the workshop then gives way to the symphony of birdsong and the forest which, from a distance, seemed so dark becomes luminous. Before reaching the exit, the route continues through a corridor serving the living rooms of the castle’s occupants, furnished in a 19th century style. On the door of a bedroom appears Engeltje (1997), a black and white image depicting the funerary sculpture of a young angel. Trouble sets in when it becomes possible to distinguish the flower he holds in his hand, moving gently, blown by an invisible breeze.