2013
Bernd Lohaus Prize awarded to Maurice Blaussyld

In considering the recipient of the Prize Bernd Lohaus only the artistic qualities of an oeuvre are taken into account, not the artist’s age or the medium in which he or she works. Anny De Decker, Stella Lohaus and last year’s winner Lien Hüwels chose four artists who had particularly attracted their attention in the previous year. Subsequently, Jan Hoet was asked to visit the artists and then to indicate the laureate. He has awarded the prize to the French artist Maurice Blaussyld.

Maurice Blaussyld (b. Calais, 1960, lives and works in Roubaix, France) makes sculptures, drawings, objects and videos. Inspired as a young artist by Joseph Beuys, Blaussyld has spent twenty-five years working consistently on an oeuvre whose core concept is transmutation: metamorphosis or mutation into another phase. In alchemy this revolves around the transformation of a base metal into gold (the elevation of the soul); in biology transmutation refers to a gradual transformation into a higher species.
Blaussyld’s oeuvre explores an ideal hidden world, a world unknown to us, evoked with exceptionally austere and precise means. All his works attempt to give form to emptiness as transmuted materiality. Early drawings of ‘energy flows’ and more particularly the recent handwritten and largely illegible texts suggest the secret of an underlying meaning.
How can we talk about immateriality / spirituality through matter? Can art give expression to non-being, to death? What forms, what subjects can be used to reveal the confinedness, the finiteness of something perceptible, something manifest? Doesn’t infinity withdraw from our gaze?
‘Maurice Blaussyld’s works live but stand still,’ writes Jan Hoet, ‘In their movement they have found the moment in which an order emerges. (…) In that intermediate moment it becomes absolute yet remains alive.’

In LLS 387 Blaussyld presented three works, brought together as a single entity, in which not only the whole but also all the parts are executed with enormous precision (position, light, shape, colour). He pursues an oeuvre, an unknown sign that could reveal our essential innerness.
‘Je pense au secret de l’homme, à sa nature intime; au dévoilement de sa destinée.’ (‘I think of the secret of man, his inner nature, the unveiling of his destiny.’)