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Sarah Smolders
Horizon Painters
What does it mean to touch a building? This site-specific artwork by Sarah Smolders explores how colour can shape the way a building is used, inhabited and shared.
- As part of
- Protocols for opening the museum
- Date
- —
- Noise level
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Level 2 ≤ 95 db
- Location
- Various across the building
Horizon Painters draws on the layered history of Brussels' former Citroën garage. For decades, workers painted its industrial steel columns during routine use and maintenance of the building, leaving behind visible layers of colour. Some columns were painted only as high as a worker could comfortably reach, without masking tape, measuring tools or standard guidelines. Elsewhere, different colours met where prefabricated partitions once enclosed parts of a column, only to be revealed during renovation. Responding to this history of paint, Smolders reactivates these "as-found" brushstrokes, interrupted gestures and colour compositions in an evolving site-specific painting, accompanied by a manual for adding further annotations to the building over time.
The artwork unfolds across two interconnected layers. An industrial layer, integrated into the building's steel structure and floors during renovation, operates at an architectural scale. A human-scale intervention, painted by Smolders and their collaborators, reintroduces the body into the work. Before Kanal's opening, they painted each steel column as a unique composition based on more than 100 preparatory drawings. Each column carries a precise colour composition derived from these drawings, which serve both as an index of the artist's process and as a record of this large-scale painting embedded within Kanal's steel structures.
Conceived to evolve, the work includes a set of instructions inviting Kanal to add new layers of paint in the future, allowing the artwork to grow alongside the building, its communities and its changing uses.
This commission forms part of How to open, the first year of Protocols for opening the museum, a three-year inquiry into what it means for a new museum in Brussels to be truly open, welcoming and public.
Sarah Smolders's human-scale paintings extend across 145 columns throughout Kanal, based on the artist's drawings. Most can be found in the public spaces; others in ticketed areas, the Kanal Architecture building, back-office areas, as well as storage and maintenance rooms. Regardless of their location or public visibility, the artist and their collaborators have painted each column with the same level of care and attention.
Credits and bios
- Horizon Painters
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- Produced by
- Curatorial Collaborator
- Original colour study of the artist initiated and facilitated by
- Industrial layer conceived by
- Execution facilitated and coordinated by
- Human-scale layer conceived by
- Execution by
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- Execution facilitated by
- With the support of
