Hugo Roelandt

THE END IS A NEW BEGINNING
 

Hugo Roelandt (Aalst 1950–Antwerp 2015) was a performer, installation artist and photographer. Between 1975 and 1987 he was one of the important figures of the Antwerp avant-garde, with Anne‑Mie Van Kerckhoven, Narcisse Tordoir, Ria Pacquée, Guillaume Bijl, Danny Devos and others. Hugo was a pioneer of performance and post performance art, and in 1981, together with Annie Gentils, founder of art space Montevideo in Antwerp. He was also a teacher at the photography department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
   Hugo Roelandt was not an artist who limited himself to one artistic genre or medium, or who continued to build on the same artistic idea or style. His works and the media he used stand out for their diversity. There were numerous collaborations with artists, musicians and scientists—but also, at the beginning and end of his career, a long series of self-portraits. Hugo saw himself, for example, first and foremost as a performer, yet at the same time he put the role of the performer into perspective, and was very critical of the direction that the medium of performance took.
   Hugo’s oeuvre can be divided into three major periods. In the first—the 70s—he evolved from photography to performance. Hugo was trained as a photographer and made, among other things, the series Feelings (image 1). The most important aspect of that series, however, was not the funny self‑portraits, but the performance aspect, the variations on the same theme that he came up with.

     PHOTO PHOTO
Representation, classical depiction in art, the canvas as a window to the world: Hugo absolutely wanted to avoid all that in his work. Still, he had studied photography at the Academy in Aalst, his hometown. In 1970, he moved to Antwerp and met Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven at the Academy, with whom he began a relationship that lasted until early 1977. 
   From the beginning, Hugo developed an aversion to what he called ‘Photo Photo’. By this he referred to a type of photography that takes itself too seriously, relies on realistic clichés, and prefers representation over expression. In short, ‘Photo Photo’ is what enthusiastic fans love so much in ‘artistic’ photography: human warmth, aesthetically attractive and romantically inspired, realistic ‘slices of life’. Everything that Hugo despised. 
   For Hugo, photography was primarily a means of capturing the constantly changing world of performance. In an interview, he stated that what happens in the camera is less interesting than what happens in front of it. In his case, the performance. A crucial work is the work Projected feelings towards something or someone (1974), better known as Feelings. It consists of several dozen slides with self-portraits. No normal, dignified, serious, introspective self-portraits. No, Hugo put on all sorts of clothes, often outfits that suggested cross-dressing. And he made silly faces at the camera. The slide series fits perfectly with the photos in drag from the same period, or the beautiful poster series of cabaret group Kiek, of which he was a member at the time.
   These sexually ambiguous portraits and selfportraits reflect the tradition of the ‘Vuil Jeanetten’ [Dirty Pansies], at the famous carnival in the Flemish city of Aalst. At the same time, they also represent the Antwerp gay scene, with figures such as Dennis Denys and Alain Mathijssens. Both played an important role in Hugo’s oeuvre. Dennis, by posing as Apollo in a performance inspired by Michelangelo. Alain, by playing the leading role in various short films from that period, such as Blue Movie, Tricolor, and A Day in the Life of a Star.

     THE 70s
I first met Hugo after a Kiek performance at Ercola on the Wolstraat, a pioneer amongst Antwerp’s art spaces. A poster shows when the meeting took place: 4 May 1974, on the occasion of a multi-art event. Hugo took part in the performance, while I was a member of the loose association of students from the University of Antwerp who were into ‘ happenings’, as the improvised events in Ercola were called. ‘Performance’ was not yet the standard term for this no-man’s-land between art and theatre. 
On 9 November 1974, I also took part in performances (plural!) in Aalst by Hugo Roelandt, Mark Verreckt, the members of the Antwerp collective Dr. Buttock’s Players Pool, and local artist William Flips. Not mentioned on the poster was a debutante who would become one of the mainstays of the Antwerp avant-garde: Ria Pacquée. Anne‑Mie Van Kerckhoven (who already signed with AMVK) and Hugo designed the poster (img. 2). There is a remnant of videotape of this pioneering performance. We see a series of completely improvised ‘acts’ with little or no coherence. Only Hugo’s is somewhat consistent: he paints the naked Mark Verreckt with stripes, causing him to disappear ‘into the background’. 
   Although I participated in that very first performance, I never saw the much more important performance and exhibition Research into the Current Aesthetic Ideal (1976), which took place two years later in the Zwarte Zaal in Ghent. Later, I did see the 3-meter-high black-and-white photographs of nudes on various occasions. In a sense, these, together with the coloured self-portraits, are Hugo’s masterpieces as an—unconventional— photographer.
    In the summer of 1976, I made my very first trip to Documenta in Kassel. I was equipped with a portable video camera, which we used to film a rehearsal of a performance at the barracks that Roger D’Hondt —from the New Reform space in Aalst—had rented. Unfortunately, the performance had to be interrupted. This was, after the Four Seasons (1977), the second consecutive performance conceived by Hugo that was cancelled within a few days. The original idea was to present the Four Seasons in Kassel. But first AMVK, and later Narcisse Tordoir and Jan Janssen, cancelled. The latter two because they preferred a more body-oriented kind of performance, influenced by the German performance artist duo Reindeer Werk, which they showed in the Antwerp gallery Today’s Place, among other locations. But that was not to Hugo’s liking. According to him, Reindeer Werk ‘acted’ their bizarre performance too much. It did not feel ‘real’.
    Hugo’s answer was a solo performance outside the barracks: he put his feet, shoes and all, in a box full of plaster and wrapped himself in a net. Unfortunately, I went home earlier that week, so I missed that performance— by now famous—in the Stadtarchiv in Kassel. It was also the first and only time Hugo sold a work of art, to a somewhat pushy collector: the box with the shoes in the plaster, which was left after the performance.
 

     BRUSSELS
During the 70s, Roger D’Hondt was the man behind Hugo’s performance career: he organised all the performances in Aalst and also had good relations with the Antwerp university. The absolute highlight of their collaboration was the ‘Performance Festival’, which was organised in 1978 in the Brussels Beursschouwburg. Everyone in Belgium and surrounding countries with any kind of connection to the medium took part. The finale, during the closing evening, was reserved for Hugo’s ‘Beursschouwburg performance’. Or to stick to the official name: If you do exactly (or not exactly) what we tell you to do, you create your own performance (1977) (img. 3). 
   I headed to Brussels to attend this unique performance —as a simple spectator. Hugo instructed the audience to gather in the theatre foyer, but they were left waiting for a long time due to an unexpected problem. The participating musicians of the Werkgroep Improviserende Musici (W.I.M.) were suspended in parachute harnesses from thick ropes in the theatre’s stage tower. Contrary to expectations, they did not remain still, but made slow circular movements. Dragging the ropes across the floor turned out to be the solution. At the entrance, as a ‘ticket’, we had received a perforated paper strip with the instructions for the performance, and we were finally allowed in. Behind the stage was a telex printer that printed the paper strips. The printing process took excruciatingly long (by today’s standards). Which was good, because the audience was only allowed on stage in small groups.
   Each of the musicians was illuminated by one spotlight. When someone from the audience stood in front of one of those beams of light, the musician in question began to play. In theory, the spectators could work together to ‘compose’ a piece of music. In reality, the result was quite chaotic, yet another attempt to ‘activate’ the audience. Nevertheless, the performance made an impression and remains a classic in the history of the Beursschouwburg.
   A year later, Hugo created a performance for Antwerp art space De Nieuwe Workshop. Jo Bafcop, a good friend of Hugo from Aalst, and I built a large wooden slope. Hugo and Mark Verreckt walked up and down in transparent plastic pyramids, until they ran out of breath. Hugo was the first to give up. Mark, always radical in his thinking and doing, continued and eventually had to be freed from his bubble. A few canaries that were also locked up in the casings did not survive the performance.

     THE 1980s
Around 1980, Hugo started a new phase in his career: his post performances. He no longer acted himself, but let the machines do the work. His first post performance was a conversation between a telephone and an answering machine, to which he, the performer, listened in silence and very remarkably did nothing: he neither acted nor reacted. 
   Hugo asked me to translate that conversation between the machines into English. And so, from 1980 onwards, I became his regular scriptwriter. In practice, writing texts for Hugo meant that he came up with the ideas and I would work them into a readable text. But it was invariably Hugo who had a few one-liners up his sleeve to characterise a new project.
    The first, or Post Performance Project 1, was the most convincing. The piece premiered on 12 June 1980, in the original Dutch version, in the King Kong hall in Antwerp—a notorious independent cultural and political centre. The physical presence of Hugo as a ‘non-performing’ performer certainly helped to create a theatrical tension in a piece that was essentially a radio play. The content of the play was the explanation of how it had come about. A second, English version, was presented in September 1980 at the ICC in Antwerp as part of the exhibition 1980, a survey of young Belgian contemporary art.
   Post Performance Project 2 (1980), again in De Nieuwe Workshop, was a collective variation on Post Performance Project 1 and consisted of performers talking to tape recorders. Post Performance Project 2b (1980) at the Warande Cultural Centre in the nearby town of Turnhout further explored the same theme, but was not limited to text. There were also film projections and an installation consisting of a table and two chairs, which were hung high on a wall in the stairwell. Hugo and fellow performer Paul Geladi sat in the chairs and again did nothing—amidst the numerous film images. 
   Post Performance Project 3 (1981) (or PPP3) combined a filmed presentation by Hugo, a series of text slides, and two videotapes of the performance in the Groendalstraat. PPP3 had a successful premiere at De Vleeshal in Middelburg in the Netherlands. Afterwards it became clear that the actual core of the piece, the two versions of the Groendalstraat performance, was by far the strongest part. The piece is a simple variation on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s blockade of the Rue Visconti in Paris with oil drums (1961-62) or the 1968 performance in which Panamarenko, Hugo Heyrman and Wout Vercammen blocked the Hendrik Conscienceplein in Antwerp with blocks of ice. But the genius of Hugo’s version is that he did not fill the Groendalstraat—a small car-free shopping street in Antwerp—with oil drums or blocks of ice or whatever, but with extras, with people. He gathered—by handing out pamphlets in the Antwerp Academy—about 30 people (he hoped for twice as many), who positioned themselves at regular intervals in the street. This happened without any aggression. The performers stood there and allowed passers-by to pass. Sometimes there were some issues, such as when an overweight postman had to ‘navigate’ between the performers with a very voluminous mailbag. But strangely enough, no one reacted aggressively or irritated, no one complained, no one called the police. The reaction was more one of wonder: ‘What does this all mean?’

     A STRANGE KIND OF POP ART
After PPP3, Hugo took a new path which, in a short time, led him to some of his best projects. Hugo’s work from this period—the Auto Matic Art Projects (1983)— fits into a general trend in the 1980s, 1970s and before, to ‘desacralise’ art, to ‘normalise’ it and make it more popular. In short, to take art out of its ivory tower and bring it back to the level of a democratic society.
   The best-known, most popular and certainly most mediatised art form that embodied this tendency is probably pop art, with Andy Warhol and his silkscreen prints of soup cans or multicoloured Marilyn Monroes. But pop art and its representatives did not show real soup cans or Brillo washing powder boxes: they showed images, silkscreens or painted representations of these everyday objects. 
   Hugo Roelandt did not copy, quote or play with examples or pioneers of his art. Warhol was undoubtedly an artist he admired. But Hugo’s ‘examples’ were more ‘counter-images’: rather than imitating another artist, he tried to distance himself. 
   What he definitely wanted to do away with was art itself. In all the years I knew him, from 1974 to 2015, he never spoke about the fact that we made ‘art’. While others, including contemporaries, built a cult around and with their art, Hugo preferred a critical, sceptical attitude. We were working on a project, and it was probably shown in an art space, and possibly even in a museum or public space. But we did not care whether it was art, or not art, or commentary on art. Or —perhaps the most appropriate term—an intervention, a message to the art world. It was a ‘project’ with implications for art and often also for society, because the two were closely linked for Hugo.
   As they were for Joseph Beuys. Hugo did not like certain, often very ‘German’ features of Beuys’ work, but he completely agreed with other aspects. For example,  with Beuys’ famous phrase that every human is an artist. Further: must be an artist, according to Hugo. Or at least everyone should make an effort to think critically, and to behave in a way that is the opposite of the way the ‘average person’ of the late 20th century behaved and behaves (often badly).
   And then there is the material. The work was not made with pencil, canvas or oil paint. It was made with fog, water, simulated lightning, model helicopters, toy cars, windscreen wipers, fans, plastic bags, cement tiles, coloured light, wind. In short, with everything that was never or hardly ever used in ‘art’. “Material that is unsuitable for making art”, Hugo himself called it. And he took pleasure in doing exactly that: using things that you did not associate with art. Or better yet: working with almost nothing, or with as little as possible.
   In his projects, Hugo also didn’t want to represent anything. He wanted the viewer to experience the work, the project or the situation as directly as possible. And he wanted to free art from its sublime loneliness. Not through commercialisation, as seems to be the rule today. On the contrary: he wanted to give art its biting qualities back. For Hugo, art had to think about this world and dare to question everything.

     NO PATTERN
The Auto Matic Art Projects (or A.M.A.P.) were a logical continuation of the Post Performance Projects, but this time even the non-acting, merely observing performer who had previously been shown on film (for example in PPP3) was missing. From now on, they are completely absent. The action in the first A.M.A.P. is performed by toy cars that bump into each other and thus coincidentally go in a different direction, like bumper cars at a fair. Their playing field is a square box. 
   The observer is a suspended video camera that shows and records the game of coloured cars from above. The project is, typical for Hugo, a ‘performance on autopilot’ and a funny caricature of the abstract painting his artist friends/rivals practiced at the time. But for Hugo it was above all a great refusal: “In A.M.A.P. we refuse to impose a fixed artistic product or a fixed pattern (on the viewer). There is no point in wanting to represent something (a representation of reality)”. So no representation, just fun.
   That was certainly also a driving force behind the Aeromatic Art Project, which premiered in the Museum D’Hondt Dhaenens (MDD) in the East Flemish commune of Sint-Martens-Latem on the occasion of the Young Artists from Antwerp exhibition (1983). I especially remember the white, kitschy garden ornaments with which Guillaume Bijl had occupied the lawn of MDD. On the other side of the entrance the lawn was empty, except for three pedestals lying on their sides. As soon as it got dark Hugo started preparing his Aeromatic Art Project. Three helicopter pilots took care of the performance with their model helicopters. In fact, they only did what is most difficult for a helicopter: ‘hovering’, trying to remain in the same place. Hugo had reduced everything to the essence: no spectacular ‘show’, no spectacle, but a simple demonstration of (more or less) stationary helicopters that tried to hover above their pedestals. This did not always succeed. Many of the artists and art lovers present probably saw it as a nice divertimento. In fact, it was intended as a provocation to an exhibition that was otherwise (except for Bijl’s work) filled with mostly traditional paintings and sculptures.

     THE CAR IN ART
The biennials of the Middelheim Open-Air Museum in Antwerp went through a difficult period in the 1980s: sculpture took on all kinds of new forms that the museum struggled with. One of the least successful editions was the 1985 Automobiënnale. However, one work was as surprising and playful as it was profound. It was called Auto mobile tergicristallo and was of course by Hugo. It consisted of 18 windscreen wipers that were mounted on poles in the pond in ‘Low Middelheim’, and were moving back and forth in an infinite rhythm. It was a sequel to the Auto Matic Art Projects, and a project that subtly referred to nature and man. Both children and artists were impressed. What was particularly appealing was the slow, somewhat jerky movement of the windscreen wipers as they returned to their vertical starting position after each movement, as if they were making a not so evident effort. Which turned out to be true: by the end of the exhibition the engines of the windscreen wipers had completely jammed.
   Response to the work came from an unexpected, Catalan source. The Fundació Joan Miró was working on an exhibition about art and water and invited Hugo to make a contribution. In April 1986, he travelled to Barcelona with five collaborators, including myself. In a VW Transporter we conveyed a version of the Middelheim project, reduced to nine windscreen wipers. The space they were intended for was famous: the terrace of the Fundació, with a magnificent view of the city of Barcelona. In Barcelona however, the windscreen wipers had less impact. They could not compete with Miró’s imposing statue and the panorama of the city. We restored the balance by buying plastic freezer bags in El Corte Inglés, filling them with water, and using them to form a chessboard in which the sun was beautifully reflected: Roelandt–Miró, 1–1.

     WAASMUNSTER
In 1985, the Academy of the East-Flemish commune of Waasmunster invited us to a double exhibition with work by, indeed: Marcel Duchamp. Hugo’s contribution consisted of the Circulation (1985) project and a replay of the Aeromatic Art Project, with a new performance by three model helicopters in the garden of the academy almost completely in the dark, I remember.
   But the most important was Circulation, consisting of a semicircle formed by eight living room fans that were mounted vertically on a wall and opposite which three microphones on a tripod captured and amplified the noise. The fans rotating back and forth were of course reminiscent of the Middelheim windscreen wipers or the helicopters in Latem but here, materiality was reduced even further. Almost nothing: wind, rustle, air, was the material with which Hugo worked.
 

     BOEL
In terms of size, yes ‘spectacle’, the Boel project was definitely the crowning achievement of Hugo’s career in the 1980s. The setting was special: in October 1985, the Antwerp suburb of Hoboken celebrated its 850th anniversary. The inhabitants were invited for a bus tour along several striking places in the municipality, where they were treated to music, theatre, dance and other activities.
   One of the striking locations in Hoboken is the shipyard that used to be called Cockerill and after 1985, as a result of a merger, became Boel Shipyard. Hugo Roelandt was invited to animate the place. 18 buses full of Hoboken residents were hung (two coaches at a time) from the gigantic gantry crane of the shipyard, and bombarded with water, flashes of light and sound (a composition by Jo Bogaert). The buses were lifted a few metres off the surface, so that the spectators literally felt the ground give way beneath them (img. 4).
   The entire performance went smoothly and according to the script drawn up by Hugo—partly thanks to the engineers of the Boel Shipyard and their workers, who had not taken any risks. However, that same night, when we told our fellow artists about the flawlessly executed project, we realized we had forgotten to involve the media. So that, apart from 18 buses of Hoboken inhabitants, no one knew about it. A mistake that Christo and Jeanne-Claude definitely never made.
 

     A LITTLE IN-BETWEEN
When we arrived at the Keizershallen in Aalst on 2 May 1986, strangely enough we had no materials with us to realise any project whatsoever. For the sake of suspense, Hugo had refused to provide further explanation during the ride. Once we arrived, it quickly became clear that the materials for the project were already, always actually, present in the Keizershallen: the event hall had a large stock of narrow tables to serve the public at beer festivals and the like. But in Hugo’s hands, the dozens of tables became building blocks for a pyramid (or stepped mastaba, to be correct), an ancient architectural typology that did not exactly fit in with the kitschy tables with light metal bases and grey plastic table tops (img. 5). Once again, Hugo changed a banal everyday object: he took it out of its beer festival context and transformed it into an age-old architectural fact, a quasi-archaeological object.

     VERTICAL FOOTPATH
After the successful participation in the Biennale 1985 with Auto mobile tergicristallo, it was almost self-evident that we would also participate in the next edition, which took place outside the park, around the entire city of Antwerp, under the title Image in the City. Thanks to the willing cooperation of new museum director Flor Bex and the M HKA (then still MuHKA), the project could be realised in the Wapenstraat, where several houses were waiting to be demolished in order to make way for the expansion of the museum.
   Hugo’s entire oeuvre evokes movement. There is only one, half, exception: Pavimenti (Italian for ‘floors’). For the 1997 biennale, Hugo devised a footpath that would continue vertically on a facade. On the one hand, it was a solid, heavy work made of cement and mortar. On the other, Pavimenti suggested a transformation— a shift from a horizontal footpath to one that shot vertically into space. It was Hugo’s most sculptural installation. The only movement was the performance at the opening, in which Hugo was pulled horizontally, down the footpath that ran along the facade.

     MONEY, MONEY
Hugo’s oeuvre, with its large projects, looks impressive— if you put it all together. Even more so when you realise that it is largely the work of ‘amateurs’. Few professionals feature in Hugo’s oeuvre: we usually did everything ourselves. 
   None of Hugo’s collaborators were ever paid. We were volunteers who were eager to work with the most unpredictable artist of the moment. The most democratic, too. Hugo was not always easy, was always the leader of the group, set the lines, and had the last word. Still, you could make a meaningful contribution. And if you disagreed with the direction he or the group was taking, you could simply leave. 
   Financially, everything was done in function of the realisation of the projects. In the first performance period, the sponsors were often theatre festivals that occasionally presented a performance as a side event. Around 1980, Hugo broke with this source of income. The later Auto Matic Art Projects were largely self-financed by Hugo, with support from the venues where they were shown. We received a travel grant from the Flemish government only once—and Hugo was not exactly looking for it, because he had an aversion to being dependent.

     GIFT
The strength, the uncommonness and almost uniqueness of Hugo’s art is its almost complete independence from money, from the art market, from art as an investment, as a manifestation of money rather than of creativity. Selling a performance—as is commonplace today—would have disgusted him (it certainly disgusts me), even selling conceptual art (whether it concerns the instructions for a mural by Sol LeWitt, or a banana with a certificate of authenticity by Maurizio Cattelan) did not fit in with his vision.
   For Hugo, art was a radical gift from the artist to (and often against) society. For him, art was a form of visual thinking. Not a way to convey thoughtful, written ideas, but itself a visual idea, a visual gift to the public. And a gift is not something neutral, it is an invitation for dialogue. That is also why his performances almost always had an audience. A work by Hugo is a sounding board that resonates, partly thanks to the spectacular quality of his interventions. It is therefore self-evident that Lydia Van Loock, Hugo’s heiress, donated his entire oeuvre to M HKA and that we never even thought about monetising it. Which in any case, given Hugo’s level of fame at the time of his death, probably wouldn’t even have succeeded. I hope it stays that way. 

     THE 1990s
Financial problems probably also played a role in Hugo’s big artistic and personal crisis at the end of the 1980s. Ultimately, this was only resolved when he began teaching full-time in the photography day class at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 1991. However, this turned out to be a double-edged sword: on one hand, it provided him with a more stable foundation for his projects; on the other, his work at the Academy consumed much of his time and energy, leaving him far less engaged with his own artistic practice. In fact, in his later years, he could hardly focus on it—perhaps he no longer even wanted to.
   As an artist, he reinvented himself for the third time in the 1990s, but this time in the more traditional framework that his teaching required. He made more personal work, reworked his coloured photographs from the early 1970s, and worked closely with his students on their individual or collective projects. The fact that he taught colourimetry as a subject was reflected in his many works on light and colour. But since these projects often took place within the confines of the Academy or its broader framework, he gradually faded from the public eye. 
   The last period of Hugo’s oeuvre was therefore the strangest for me, the most astonishing, especially compared to his earlier work. It is only after having organised exhibitions with work from that last period that I begin to understand it. In any case, that later work has grown in status and importance for me. 
   At the time they were made, the works seemed strange to me. On one hand, I was pleased that Hugo had rediscovered himself artistically after his deep crisis. A lot revolved around colours, and among them were his strange inventions, such as four televisions stacked on top of each other, each displaying only white-noise (img. 6). Or small sculptures, nonsensical objects for example, such as a sharp knife ‘planted’ in a coffee cup filled with potting soil. Little jokes, actually. Intended to provoke. I did sympathise with these attempts to relativise the institution of ‘academy’. What I did not see at the time was that behind Hugo as a jester (as in his self-portrait as a dancing harlequin) there was also a serious artist at work. Coloured spaces, coloured photographs, coloured works from the past that were brought up-to-date. Works he had created in the 1970s, which he now printed in large format and even on aluminium plates. Which he then presented ‘almost sloppily’ as if he wanted to sabotage his own work, the new aesthetic that he —who never cared much for ‘beauty’—had reinvented by raking up his past. That entire last period in Hugo’s work is one gigantic Möbius strip that constantly reinvents itself, a return to the past as present, an eternal return in which he reimagines the work from his youth as a work of the future. Because the past is not really the past, it is also the source of the future. 
   Hugo’s self-portraits are not self-portraits. Most are actually series of the same self-portrait. The 20 small self portraits from the 1970s, for example, and the seven, large versions printed on aluminium from the early 1990s, are all based on a single photo that he turned into a series by different colouring.
 

     HUGO TODAY
In 2016, during the second (and most successful) exhibition in Antwerp art space Objectif Exhibitions which focused on his work in colour, we presented his work through the lens of a contemporary artist. A prominent Belgian contemporary artist made his entrance that evening: Guillaume Bijl. Of course, Bijl knew Hugo from their early years together. But he had completely lost sight of him. And although she is a curator who knows contemporary Flemish art very well, his Austrian wife had never even heard of him! That is how complete Hugo’s disappearance from the Flemish art scene has been since the 1990s.
   And yet he had thought about a comeback. When we travelled to the Venice Biennale for a week in 2011, it was with the explicit aim of ‘starting over’. But in Venice Hugo suffered constantly from a sore throat. It turned out to be cancer. Literally during his last days, he asked me to take care of his artistic legacy. That seemed like an almost impossible task. How on earth could I bring back into the spotlight works that seemed completely at odds with public (commercial) taste—especially those of an artist whom even specialists in Flemish contemporary art had never heard of? Well, somehow, with a lot of luck and the help of many people—such as Lydia Van Loock, Antony Hudek, Annie Gentils, Bart De Baere, Joanna Zielińska, Nav Haq, and everyone at Objectif Exhibitions, M HKA and CKV—I managed. But the most important factor in this comeback is Hugo Roelandt himself, who left behind a defiant oeuvre that, ten years after his death, continues to speak to us and fascinate us more than ever.