Luk Van Soom

The sculptor

Luk Van Soom was born on October 27th, 1956 in Weelde-Statie, a small village in the north of Belgium. More than 60 years later, he has a long list of high-profile exhibitions and projects on his name at home as well as abroad. He represented Belgium at the World Exhibition of Spain (1992) and installed a twelve-meter-high lamp tree on the beach of Middelkerke for the triennial 2006 Beaufort. In addition, he created more than 50 works in public space in the Netherlands and Belgium, such as Walhalla (1993, Antwerp), The Man from Atlantis (2003, Brussels), The Wharfinger (2005, Zwolle) and Walking to Magdalena (2012, Ostend).

In 2015, with a wink he handed a copy of his crucifix variant Oh Superman! (2010) to Pope Francis. For his monograph Into View / Tevoorschijn (2016) he received input from art connoisseurs such as Lisette Pelsers, Jan Teeuwis and Sara Weyns, as well as from prominent figures from other domains, such as Rik Torfs, Frank De Winne and Christine Van Broeckhoven.

Van Soom taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Amsterdam Rietveld Academy; nowadays he is teaching at the St. Joost Academy in Breda and coaching an unstoppable stream of assistants and trainees in his own studio. As an artist and teacher, he not only insists on knowledge of age-old materials and techniques, but continues to experiment with new technologies. As a lifelong self-sustaining artist, Luk Van Soom is an example and mentor for many young and future artists. However, he is still far from thinking about retiring. With this project and an innovative partner project that will also soon be crowned, he continues to explore new grounds.

The miraculous clouds

Lisette Pelsers

Ernst Gombrich’s unsurpassed book Art and Illusion contains a chapter entitled: The image in the clouds.

In it Gombrich describes a conversation between the Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana and his companion Damis. The description is taken from Philostratus. The conversation proceeds according to the best Socratic method. The question raised is: what does a painting essentially consist of? The answer is: from a composition of colours. A few questions and answers later, they state that the purpose of a painting is to create an image that resembles something from the visible reality, e.g. a dog or a man or a ship (at the time around the birth of Christ, abstraction was absolutely out of the question).

But then Apollonius asks: what about the images we sometimes see in the sky, in the clouds? Is god a painter who entertains himself by painting patterns in the clouds? No, of course that is not the case, both think. It is purely our own imagination that shows us images and likenesses in the clouds.

Nowadays, we know more about this process than in Apollonius’ time. “Projection” became an area of focus in psychology, put into practice in the so-called Rorschach test, in which individuals are asked what they “see” in a symmetrical inkblot. What we see in these spots or in the random patterns in the clouds depends on our imagination, our ability to recognize images stored somewhere in our brain.

I was thinking about this passage yesterday. Not only because some of Luk Van Soom’s images look like clouds, like raised foam masses. But also because he expresses his relationship with the clouds. And the resemblance to the shapeless mass of the clay from which he models his sculptures. All that clay comes from a clay barrel in his studio and, once the mold has been made, goes back into it. The clay contains so many images that have already been created and has yet to reveal so many more images hidden within it.

Lisette Pelsers (° 1956) is an art historian and has been director of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo since 2012. She wrote the above text on the occasion of the unveiling of the sculpture The Wharfinger on May 18th, 2008 in Zwolle. The text was adapted and used again in Luk Van Soom’s monograph Into view / out of appearance.