Benoît van Innis Exhibition Launches in Brussels
Belgian artist and cartoonist Benoît van Innis (1960-2024) made many drawings and cartoons published in both European and American newspapers and magazines, and in particular for The New Yorker. Artist in architecture highlights this early rejection alongside his decades-long career bridging visual art and the built environment. Co-authored by architects An Fonteyne and Elke Schoonen, the publication accompanies a compact exhibition at Passa Porta in Brussels. From the late nineties onward, Benoît focused more on painting, began dealing with architecture, and was involved in various projects bringing art and the built environment together.
The Maalbeek Metro Station Commission
Van Innis turned down the initial mid-1990s discussions because he felt integrating art into a worn-down station was pointless, according to medeauteur Elke Schoonen. Operating as a young man in his early thirties, the artist convinced officials to accelerate the station’s renovation and incorporate art and architecture under architects he recommended himself.
By 2000, the station unveiled his minimalist black-and-white portraits of waiting commuters. Schoonen notes that while the line drawings appear simple, they prove impossible to replicate accurately, capturing the artist’s sharpness and spatial confidence. He made the works on tiles from a factory in Portugal—with which he would cooperate for more than twenty years. You feel his typical sharpness and daring in it, which he was then able to transfer from paper to space seemingly effortlessly,
Schoonen states.
Memorializing the 2016 Brussels Attacks
The platform portraits gained renewed prominence as Brussels icons following the 2016 terrorist attacks. The images appeared as stickers across the city, on temporary chalk drawings at the Bourse memorial square, and frequently included a tear added for the victims.
That public resonance drove van Innis to push for a dedicated memorial artwork for the victims inside the station. In July 2016, authorities unveiled his olive tree installation featuring a poem by Federico García Lorca. Schoonen explains that The olive tree was a symbol of peace but also one of his favorite themes, inspired by the periods he spent picking olives in a friend’s Italian orchard.
Book Details Benoît's Spatial Works and Artistic Exchanges
Architecture would remain a lifelong passion, as the book Benoît shows. It offers insight into his artistic exchanges with architects and shows how these can result in a new shared authorship on the blurring boundary between art and architecture. Structured into four thematic chapters—titled Table, Room, Landscape, and City—each beginning with a looking text, it goes into detail on ten of Benoît’s spatial works. Additional reflections contemplate Benoît’s working method, production, and craft. The book concludes with a visual catalog of Benoît’s complete spatial oeuvre. The volume stems from ongoing research into the artist’s work conducted within the Chair of Affective Architectures led by Professor An Fonteyne at ETH Zürich.