The three installations of Stefaan Van Biesen, ‘Buzzer 1’, ‘Library’ (‘Appendix’) and ‘Plant Talker’, show a same sensibility and empathy for the environment in which he is working. To him, the park and nature are no setting. 

They almost  become a medium, a place where man is confronted with incomprehensible phenomena and insoluble questions, but also with his own impotence and insignificance. Doubt and melancholy are never hard to find in Van Biesen’s oeuvre.

‘Buzzer 1’ belongs to a series of pieces of art which have been created by his fascination for sounds of nature and the world of bees. It is a wooden sound box with belfry windows of which the back has been made of an organic material of feathers, sand and foam. Surprisingly is the confrontation between the smooth front and the back, which reminds you of an animal’s nest or of the pellets of an owl. It is as if the artist wants to neutralize the ‘imaginary’ contrast between nature and culture. The piece of art has been put like a precious shrine, a reliquary, on two branches of a large tree in the beech alley. Is it a peace offering to the tree or a present of the tree?

Elsewhere in the park, he has made a small library leaning against a tree trunk, on a branch which is like turning away from the tree and supported by a nest box. The books have been binded and are therefore illegible. “I am a silent observer, who experiences at the bottom of your crown, how inaccessible knowledge can be, how intangible life can be”, as he writes in a ‘Letter to a Tree’. How is it, for example, that birds can sing and fly? “Science is looking for answers to unanswerable questions and looking to your bark, with the books carried by your branches, I wonder whether we will ever really know. Whether man will be able to reach the knowledge which explains the secret of life (...) Here I express my insignificance to nature, my impotence to declare is a recognition and immoderate enjoying of  her beauty.” Art as an attempt to fathom comforting nature.With the ‘Plant talker’ he seems to hand over an instrument to start the (impossible?) dialogue with nature. It is a big prompt box in which you can stand up. You can then see a small fragment of a young tree through a horizontal slit. The prompt box is a tool which you can use to talk to a young birch tree and to encourage it to become big and strong. So it is more like a metaphor for the incompetence to converse with nature in a natural way...

Paul Geerts,