Grenadier - 2015

Object and Sculpture

Description

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Grenadier
(2015)
various materials
± 240 x 80 x 75 cm
unique

Production In:
Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres (BE)
Photo: Birger Stichelbaut

The visitor is greeted by a Grenadier, whose formis a bust of the artist.
The bust in question here is surmounted by a multitude of a single fruit, in this case an accumulation of pomegranates. Again, it is the identity of a fruit that gives body and sense to his artwork, his sculptures. It is a very particular fruit, one of few that has given its name to a weapon*.
Mehdi-Georges Lahlou plays afresh with the ambiguity of its name and, in this case, with a certain formal relationship between the fruit and the weapon.
Some of the pomegranates seem open, exploded: a simple flash in the pan or something more dangerously depinned before approaching the irreversible? The bust is imposing not only because of the enormous headdress that crushes it, but also because of the size of its base, a concrete pedestal which, in this space, also seems to serve as a headstone that could be read as commemorative.

Bernard Marcelis

*TN: the French word ‘grenadier’ can designate either a solider who tosses grenades or a pomegranate tree. Similarly, the word ‘grenade’ has a dual meaning as weapon or fruit.

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