Since the beginning of his career at the end of the 1980s, Wim Delvoye (1965, Wervik, Belgium) has been working at shifting the boundaries traditionally separating popular culture from art, the decorative from the fine arts, the historical from the contemporary, and the noble from the impure. Delvoye has created the metallic, gothic-inspired chapel with stained glass windows containing subversive imagery specially for Mudam. The artist makes reference to his own work in black, grey and coloured glass. Obscene gestures, kisses, human intestines and skeletons from Cloaca are x-rayed, thus gaining the status of pagan stained glass windows. His x-rayed pieces of meat unveil their atheist message thanks to the light that stained glass once rendered divine. The skulls, the bones and their by-products are grimacing, cynical modern Vanities.

‘I am aware that ornament may constitute a crime; be that as it may, I am committing that crime,’ states Delvoye, referring to the Viennese architect Adolf Loos who, in the early 20th century, lauded the abandonment of ornament in architecture. His works are often the products of an ornamental gesture, which acquires a conceptual dimension as it develops. Applied to common and industrial objects, as with the series Untitled (Truck Tyre) (2013), he reverses value scales and reconciles industry, fine arts and decorative arts.

Delvoye’s Dutch Gas-Cans series is characteristic of the first ‘displacements’ he made at the start of the 1980s, where everyday objects, connected with manual and domestic work, were decorated with motifs borrowed from the decorative arts. Voluntarily anachronistic, the iconography in the work is reminiscent of the golden age of Dutch decorative arts, echoing Delvoye’s earliest artistic ambition for his work, ‘to be provincial and transform it into something international’. Known for the refinement of the blue and the quality of its enamelling, the familiar designs of Delftware, originating in the 17th century, which are usually found on tableware, kitchen tiles and other decorative objects, are now transferred to gas canisters. Among those patterns which the artist has meticulously copied using the technique of enamel painting, one can see the windmill, evoking the stereotypical image of a Dutch landscape. This series is representative of Delvoye’s early work, when he was focussing on a certain ‘regionalism’.