Palais de Injustice Painting

I lived in Brussels from 2011-2013 and the building depicted in this piece is the Palais de Justice which I passed most days. It looms like a behemoth over the city. The Palais was built on the hill above the Marolles where for hundreds of years public executions took place. It was constructed between 1866 - 83 and is generally regarded as the largest building in Europe of the 19th century. Though the project was initiated during the reign of Leopold I, the construction began and was completed during the reign of Leopold II - the builder king. The financing of the extensive number of royal and pubic building in Belgium in general and in Brussels in particular derived chiefly from the colonial exploitation of the Congo Free State (now DRC). The Congo Free State, preceded by the A.I.A (International African Society) became the personal property of Leopold II and controlled by the Force Publique. This private army made up of volunteers but was essentially a mercenary army used for the enforcement of the extraction of resources from the various trade area concessions, especially within both the Domaine de la Couronne (Crown Dominion) and ABIR (Anglo Belgian India Rubber Company). With the invention of the Dunlop’s pneumatic tyre, the increasing ubiquity of its use, initially for bicycles and latterly for motor vehicles the global demand for rubber boomed. To supply this demand there resulted a systematic and brutal enforcement of labour in the Congo during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The resulting atrocities of this period are the subject of ‘King leopard’s Ghost’ by Adam Hochschild in which the author describes how mass deaths happened as a result of the forced labor system instituted at Leopold's direction. Brussels, at least for me, has a strange atmosphere and nothing epitomises this more than the Palais de Justice. It sits brooding on its hill, out of scale to anything in the city, as if in saturnine judgement. On most days the low skies seem to shroud the massive grey edifice in drizzle. On brighter days other days, obscuring the sun, appropriately it appears a black storm cloud at the western end of the Rue de la Régence casting a long shadow. It has to quote Josef Conrad the ‘fascination of the abomination’ and indeed there is a darkness at the heart of Brussels and thus also at the heart of Europe since Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union. For many years the Palais de Justice has been clad in scaffolding being patched and repaired, shored up here and there without it seems the will to complete the renovations commenced after it was damaged extensively during the second world war. There it is, in grandiloquent and tragic irony, a huge mirage like facade-, seen-yet-unseen at the edge of our collective peripheral memory, a sort of judgement in stone. It appears a ruin before it’s time, a memorial of sorts for all the colonial injustice of times past. The Palais de Justice was naturally Hitler’s favourite building and in 1940 he sent Albert Speer to Brussels to study the building to inform his megalomaniac, unrealised and unrealisable plans for the transformation of Berlin into the Welthauptstadt Germania. Belgium has had and continues to have a particularly strong tradition for symbolic and surreal art- from Fernand Khnopff, Felicien Rops and Leon Spilleart through Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte and on to Luc Tuymans, Hans Op de Beeck and Michael Borremans today. Perhaps this lineage has its roots and derives from the time of Leopold II’s ‘empire of darkness’, some sense of unspecified unease in regard to the splendour of fin de siècle Brussels?. More probably I suspect it’s merely the low introspective skies that induce a pensive interiority there. Certainly in my two years there a bright sunny day had a definite sense of the super real about it and seemed to produce a sort of mania in the people such as that seen in Pieter Bruegal the Elder’s ‘The Harvesters’. The subtle fusing of the real with the unreal, the imaginary with the visible so typical of these artists can become a way of seeing, a way of regarding the world and a way of allowing the unpalatable or disturbing aspects of the world to coexist with the preferable. As such I would suggest the Palais de Justice is a symbolist or surreal building in this tradition. And yet every time I encountered it it struck me rather in the way The Black Tower of John Smith’s film of the same name does it’s narrator; a kind of inverted void. I knew at some time I would have to make a picture of it. ‘In the empty immensity of sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent’ Conrad Nb the materials used in this piece include those derived from the natural resources of the now Democratic Republic of Congo: Ivory Black (i.e. bone black) Cobalt Oxide Copper Oxide Natural Rubber Erasers

Painting:Charcoal on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:106.3 W x 41.7 H x 0.2 D in

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