Mark Dedrie Biography

BRONZE MUSICALITY

Mark Dedrie does not take his ease in our rapidly evolving art scene. Avers to short lived fashions he works along a well-defined process and with pure craftsmanship in the creation of the sculpture as his inner eye sees it ideally. Do not search for detailed sculptor’s drawings in Dedrie’s drawers. To him, a sculpture is a sculpture, it is not a spatially filled in, two dimensional drawing. Dedrie dreams and sees the sculpture in his mind’s eye. Over and over again he builds it up slowly and unrepeatable. He constructs it, casts it in bronze, polishes it and caresses it almost infinitely – until he has realized that Unique sculpture of his dreams with that unparalleled and spiritualized patina. For meaning and appearance must impregnate each other and form a completely homogeneous unity.

Materiality and corporeal craftsmanship: The sculptures Dedrie makes turn their back on conceptual art. As such the surface structure of Inner Pressure does not form the casual exterior of the idea within; on the contrary it crowns – without emphasis but in an authentic and necessary way – the healed because organic body which is called sculpture. Dedrie makes truth sound through in the beauty of the sculptural skin, as the anonymous and poetic word with its radiant significance enlightens the music of a passion or cantate from Bach.

In No Secrets the sculptor has turned the lovers towards one another and forged them to unity. There is not a bit of personality in any of the two characters, nor longing looks, nor appeal. Dedrie clenches the material heaviness to the spiritual lightness. Doing so he reaches for perfection that throws the couples’ presumptuous individuality on the paves of reality. Only their singing remains. Because everything Dedrie produces becomes bronze musicality.

It is not only in his human images that Dedrie wants music. The transcendental is also present in his sculptures of animals, even if Dedrie on this subject does not reveal himself as an ‘animalier’, a craftsman catching the essence of an animal in a characteristic movement or an anecdotic pose. Dedrie does not aim for the lively and remarkable appearances of the swan and the heron. But indeed the heron as the symbol of tall, calm and inspired beauty (maybe also of fortune in the way the Far East sees the crane) and as an elegant and imperturbable presence of the superior. In the same way, Dedrie’s Swan does not appear as an ornamental being, living in neat parks and ponds. No, the animal refers to reflectivity, it calls for interiorization in a world of empty noise.

And the Ram – obviously the most complex and fascinating statue from Dedries’ zoo of bronzes unites in itself elegant masculinity and compacted power, perseverance and respect. Who is not reminded here of the Golden Fleece, the skin of the legendary speaking and flying ram which gave its name to a Burgundian aristocratic Order searching for spiritual wealth?



Dedrie also works in stainless steel. Shiny and cold, this rust proof material looks distant but also fascinating. It is often applied in kitchens, operation rooms and bathrooms. It is used for automatic household appliances and for instruments that are daily used intensively or clinically. Dedrie chooses the stainless steel material because of its cold appearance, which is very suitable to shape the handsome king penguins. Penguins are birds that prefer to swim and cannot fly properly. On soil they move with the awkwardness of a hopelessly obese person. Penguins continue to amaze the world and they keep moving us by their anthropomorphic appearance. These inefficient butlers of an old family hotel hold the mirror up to us. They show us the intense bond between the promethean, highly technological man and a fallen bird. Totally apathetic, sometimes gracious, then clumsy and seemingly distracted or dreaming, these penguins show us the better part, the unpretentiousness in man, but more pure, closer to a state of natural grace , and untouched by the cunning game of roles of which man has made himself a victim.

In this way, Mark Dedrie, through his bronze sculptures, searches for what the German philosopher Hegel called ‘Der wesentliche Inhalt der Skulptur’ – form of the divine, at the same time dreamt and rendered perceptible to the senses. In his most successful representations of the natural, the idealizing sculptor indeed offers his viewers spiritual values and virtues, whilst briefly touching the supernatural.

Frans Boenders , Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts