Joost Pauwaert

Joost Pauwaert (BE, °1985) loves heavy wooden and metal machines and objects such as anvils, cannons and giant saw blades. He makes the machines himself, starting from technical challenges. Can he make a heavy anvil balance on a spring? Or catapult it and catch it in a funnel? Can he make his own cannon? Or make two cannons fire at each other simultaneously so that the cannonballs hit each other and deform?

The artistic beauty of these ventures derives from the originality of the questions, on the opposite side of the usual forms of artistic expression.
Actually, they precede and take us back to times when science and art were closer to each other than today. Or they lead us back to fundamental questions in sculpture, which always had to do with gravity and density.

Here we come closer to a fundamental poetry, which stems from the beauty of things themselves.

(text by Hans Theys)

 

A New Study for an End of the World No. 2

 

A New Study for an End of the World