In this series, COLLECT takes a closer look at the place of young artists in the contemporary art scene. Why do they make the work they do, where does their inspiration come from, and how do they see themselves within the art world? This month: Maarten Van Roy (°1985, Bonheiden, BE).
 
“It feels like coming home”, he says about his exhibition at Cc Strombeek, located between his studio in the American Theatre (built in 1958 for the World Expo), café Palto by the Church of Saint Lambert in Laeken, and the Mira astronomical observatory. “I have a soft spot for abandoned, worn-down places, where their disintegration brings a certain calm,” says Maarten Van Roy. “Since I was able to take over this studio at the American Theatre a few years ago, I’ve felt increasingly connected to the surroundings.” As with all his exhibitions, Van Roy enters into a close dialogue with the context of Studio S at Cc Strombeek. “I want to make the space more legible in a gentle way. If you were to consider it as a sentence, my works would form the punctuation,” he explains. “Constructing an exhibition is a visceral act of organizing and introducing scale into a space. You create a tension between the objects. While I used to see my works mainly in relation to one another as well as to the exhibition space—and therefore didn’t always sell them individually—I now aim for each sculpture to function as an autonomous artwork. I realized how important exhibiting is for my practice during my master’s in Münster, Germany. While at KASK in Ghent I received a strong theoretical and technical foundation, it was there—under the guidance of Henk Visch—that I could cultivate my spatial awareness and intuition.”

Shortly after completing his studies, the artist worked with bronze for the first time, and the material has fascinated him ever since. “At the same time, the serial aspect didn’t appeal to me much, and I don’t like unnecessary work and synthetic materials, like the standard silicone mould,” he explains. “From this économie des gestes I developed a technique in which I model cast wax sheets into three-dimensional sculptures during the brief moment of the solidification process. That enables me to put aside my rational thinking and let my physical intuition guide me. Although we rarely recognize it, the body contains just as much knowledge as the brain. A work of art that is overthought often lacks a deeper power. Opting for a cold and layered  application of patina for the finishing of the series Black Hole, Blind Spot, Dead Angle (2020–2021) allowed environmental factors—and the unpredictable—to play a crucial role in shaping the work.”
 
UNPREDICTABILITY
By surrendering to the material, Van Roy allows the sculptures themselves a considerable degree of agency. In his newest series, Us Open (2024–2025), created during a residency at Fonderia Battaglia in Milan, he once again embraced that unpredictability. “There I produced ‘direct casts’ in bronze from broken and sampled Easter chocolate figures. The natural fracture lines, caused by breaking these lovingly designed figures, bring new life to them, and the boundary between inside and outside begins to blur,” he explains. “Thanks to a casting test we discovered that a certain ingredient in the chocolate causes glitches in the bronze casting. While the Italian craftsmen initially struggled to appreciate this imperfection, I gratefully made use of that uncertainty. It involved considerable risk, but it resulted in a significant leap in quality.” Although that risk might be interpreted as a form of self-destruction, Van Roy sees it primarily as an act of generosity. “In those places, the texture of the universe reveals itself,” he says. “The unpredictability described in chaos theory has nothing to do with arbitrariness. On the contrary, the disorder is deterministic. In that sense, after all the creative mayhem, it is still the sculptor who decides—or determines—what is shown and what is not.”
 
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Alongside this perspective on matter on a macro scale—linked to the universe—Van Roy is fascinated by the human relationship with materials. This connects to his love for the everyday and familiar, and what that reveals about our lives. “Although I derive great satisfaction from creating, I quickly recognized the artistic potential of what surrounds us. By finding and presenting objects that align with—or even surpass—my sculptural vision, I enriched my visual language,” the artist explains. “I manipulate these objects as little as possible and try to convey to the viewer the intensity I felt when discovering them. Doing nothing then becomes the pinnacle of creative labor, and a tension emerges between the handmade and the readymade.”
The question of artistic authorship interests him, as Van Roy does not see material as merely a passive substance to be shaped. “The materials I work with are granted a significant degree of autonomy. Artists who are willing to put their exclusive authorship on the line inspire me. When you allow your art to take over, it often results in ambiguous readings. I see this, for example, in musicians and producers such as Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Lana Del Rey. They have played a major role in my development. The ease with which they transform themselves and recombine existing sounds in new ways feels very familiar to me. They approach identity in a fluid way and have thus carved out their unique position. The book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher left a lasting impression on me in that regard.”

Although Van Roy’s work has a strong theoretical undercurrent, that framework is primarily a consequence of the practice itself. “As a child I collected all kinds of objects, and at sixteen I was welding pieces of scrap metal together. Gradually I began to study materials and the ways in which they allow you to observe phenomena on a larger scale,” he says. “When objects break or erode, their entropy increases, bringing them closer to their evolutionary fate. That process also strengthens their expressive power and authenticity. In that vulnerability, larger connections become visible. In my Stellar Blades (2021–), for instance—a series in which I use float glass as a carrier of its own physical properties—you can discern formations reminiscent of stellar nebulae. With my work I offer the viewer the opportunity to be consciously and physically present in a specific place. In doing so, I provide visual food for thought.”