My piece on Scott Nelles yesterday reminded me that I had been meaning to do a piece on Stephane Halleux. Halleux is one of my favorite sculptors. His robots, cars, flying machines and other assorted coolnesses are made from found objects, and assembled with a sense of humor that is equal to his sense of style. I’m in awe of his color palette, notion of wear, use of materials and overall design sense.
Halleux hails from Belgium, where he spent many an hour dragged by his parents “against his will” to different museums. But this reluctant extracurricular education paid off: when he was 10, he was in a museum where he was taken with the work of sculptor Jean Tinguely – playful art that looked like toys – and found himself inspired.
The artist is drawn to film and comics, and so it was natural that he wound up at an animation studio in Luxembourg for a bit, finding work as a colorist and layout artist. According to Halleux, this part of his life marked a seven-year period of “drawing uninteresting things for other people”, and he began to despair of being able to ever draw anything else. When he ultimately found the animation industry too lacking in creativity, he took a job working for a bankruptcy furniture liquidator, where he began finding tons of discarded objects that began to form the basis of his work, and his artistic inspiration returned. His work was well-received in a very successful exhibition in 2005, and he’s been a full time artist ever since.
Man, I’d love to have one of his pieces sitting on my desk. Inspirational work from an inspirational artist.
