Belgian architecture-artist

Koen Deprez

1986

Table pratique

A photograph of smooth, flat rock formations along a coastline hangs on the wall. What does it take to turn the rocks into a table? Not much. Just a single, spontaneous moment – the fraction of a second in which one instinctively and silently finds a crevice in which to sit. It is the same kind of ease with which people find a place to rest a bag or cup, or strike up a conversation with a companion.
Table pratique is a blunt tribute to the unmediated site as a locus for potential. Devoid of any sort of programme and almost silent in character, the setting remains open to multiple uses. In this respect, Table pratique is a direct critique on a statement made by Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983): 'If you are in a shipwreck… a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat…makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.' Deprez, on the other hand, stresses the versatility of objects: they can mean whatever people want them to mean, and in whatever context. This is the only way for an uncorrupted landscape to become a functional site of interaction. Table pratique is a form of indifference par excellence and, as such, can be considered a pivotal work within Deprez's oeuvre.

Collage, 29 x 42 x 5 cm

Collage, 29 x 42 x 5 cm