The Van Hoe Collection - Grammar of Textiles

“With this collection, I attempt to clarify that these are not only textile designs. There is a lot more to it than that: making links to developments in the fields of art, culture and politics is only logical and at least as important. My collection seeks above all to stimulate curiosity when reading (or learning to read) images.”

Marc Van Hoe

Excerpt 'The Van Hoe collection: an unruly herbarium'

If there has ever been a man to whom this motto applies, it’s Marc Van Hoe. The man, or more precisely the artist, behind this rich collection — formed from fragments, sketches, drawings, scale designs for fabrics and wallpaper — is far from being the anaesthetist of his collections. Sometimes simply held to the wall with magnets, the drawings, left free from frames or covering glass, have their skin in contact with the air and the light: living. When they are not filed away in their drawers, it is with enthusiasm that he picks them out; a term that means to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Because this collection is also a conversation, Marc Van Hoe, creator of designs and fabrics, has a non-stop dialogue with the drawings that he has saved from certain destruction. Sometimes, the collector becomes a creator, thus making the grain rise up, from the thistle or the Dalhia. Behind this collection, a garden dense with designs, hide the artists and artisans with whom Marc Van Hoe has a conversation. For him, plants are no longer stylised and drawn, but first literally scanned and then retouched by his hand. From tracing to scanning; from pixel to pigment. The stylisation is not important, providing that there is intoxication.

But what also constitutes the strength of this collection is also due to the benevolence of its owner. It is not an edited-down ensemble in which only the leaves that might have pleased their owner are the ones to have been kept. He has a greater affinity for some of them; for others he expresses a slight disdain, and a few, despite being of inferior quality, appeal to him precisely because of their clumsiness. It is very much this diversity — without even mentioning the multitude of styles that range from the neo-Louis XVI to the Atome — that make this ensemble so fascinating.

Benjamin Zurstrassen
Curator Horta Museum, Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles, Belgium