It’s Tuesday, 27 May, and the Giardini, one of the cornerstone locations of the Venice Biennial, has opened its doors for the preview of what is still the most famous biannual gathering of contemporary art in the world.

After a first rush of visitors, the Belgian pavilion has almost emptied. It’s enveloped by a sacrosanct silence, a feeling fuelled by the gloaming that De Bruyckere (pictured) has created in the space. And by the 17-metre long tree that fills the entire room. Kreupelhout - Cripplewood is the only piece the 48-yearold artist has made for the pavilion, but it’s clearly a matter of quality over quantity. The uprooted elm has an impressive lower trunk from which spring sturdy branches. At some spots, sheets are wrapped around the tree. Its weather-beaten bark is greyish brown with some reddish spots, like badly healed wounds.

For more than a decade, De Bruyckere has become internationally famous for her wax sculptures. First of dead horses, their bodies hanging from the air, lying on a table or simply on the ground, twisted and contorted. Later the sculpture were humans, or rather: faceless human bodies, as often as not contorted. Scrawny bodies, whose eeriness is heightened by their pallor.

Emotional impact

Indeed, Kreupelhout - Cripplewood is a wax sculpture. It reminds me of a wounded wild animal that, with an ultimate effort, might jump up again. But it also could be a fallen giant, lying in pain. Or a phallus symbol.

Great art is often multi-interpretable, and that certainly is the case with Kreupelhout - Cripplewood. It makes you think, but even more: it has a great emotional impact. Like almost all De Bruyckere’s work, it astonishes you, it makes you shudder. There’s a feeling of fear, even horror; but in the end, the work feels comforting.

The sculpture is based on a real elm. “Two years ago I found this tree – uprooted, not cut down – in a field in France,” says De Bruyckere. “I immediately fell in love with it.”

We’re standing in one of the dark alcoves that surround the central room, which holds the artwork. The tree, she continues, “radiated a great sense of loneliness: Someone was so cruel as to uproot a 150-year-old tree. It reminded me of uprooted people who have to leave their country because of, for instance, a war. Uprooting can’t be undone.”

Two years ago, De Bruyckere didn’t know she would be at the Venice Biennial in 2013. “I only knew that I wanted to do something with the tree. When I got selected for Venice, I had the idea to incorporate it.”

With the help of her assistants, she made a wax copy of the elm, a long and painstaking process. Unlike her horses or human bodies, the tree is not deformed.

The exterior of the tree is made of wax but “inside, there’s a whole iron construction to prevent it from collapsing,” she explains. “Wax isn’t very strong; the tree would break under its own weight if we didn’t reinforce it from the inside.” The tree was shipped in smaller parts and assembled and finished on site.

Curated by Coetzee

The curator of the Belgian pavilion is the much-lauded South African writer JM Coetzee. De Bruyckere had already collaborated with him last year for a special publication of the Flemish literary magazine DW B. A curator normally selects the works and builds the exhibition, but that's not what De Bruyckere wanted for Venice. Instead, she was looking to a curator “to feed” her, to inspire her. Coetzee sent her an unpublished short story, and they started an intense correspondence, published in the exhibition catalogue, in which he mostly gives short answers to her musings, ideas and uncertainties. Coetzee will only see the work for the first time this month in Venice.

Three themes converge in Kreupelhout – Cripplewood. The notion of uprooting and, “secondly, Saint Sebastian, who protected against the bubonic plague and who has been highly revered in Venice,” explains De Bruyckere. “I still feel the presence of the pestilence, though now it doesn’t take the form of the bucolic plague, but of Aids or cholera – epidemics that rend us highly vulnerable or have the power to exterminate whole populations.” She leads me closer. “Sebastian is present in the tree. Look at the bark; it almost looks like a wrinkled skin.” Sebastian is generally represented tied to a tree, his body pierced by arrows. “Here’s he’s inside the tree, an inverse metamorphosis.”

The third motif is Venice: “The flaking walls and the water-induced bumps that are characteristic for the houses in this city,” she says. “The threat that this city will one day be completely swallowed by the water.”

That disquieting imagery, in fact, inspired De Bruyckere to alter the inside of the pavilion. The interior, normally a clean, white space, bathing in daylight, is unrecognisable: the walls are black, the skylight is darkened with black linen, barely letting through a ray of light, and on the floor lies roofing.

Coming to Ghent

It’s quite exceptional for an artist at the biennial to make a work so strongly linked to the city. But “that was important,” stresses De Bruyckere. “To me, Venice is not a place where you can do whatever you want. Everywhere you go in this city, you feel its culture and history. My team and I absorbed the art we saw in Venice – the reds in the artwork, for instance, refer to Veronese and Tintoretto. I wanted to give something back to the city.”

De Bruyckere’s work is indeed always anchored in the space where it’s first shown, be it at the biennial or a gallery in New York City. Still, the work transcends the space for which it’s made. “Kreupelhout - Cripplewood will be shown at the SMAK in Ghent next year, in a white room with daylight,” she concludes. “That’ll work, too.”

www.belgianpavilion.be

The Flemish in Venice

Berlinde De Bruyckere has filled the Belgian Pavilion with her Kreupelhout - Cripplewood sculpture, but she’s not the only Flemish artist at the Venice Biennial. Three were selected for the central exhibition The Encyclopaedic Palace, assembled by the 55th biennial’s curator, the New York-based curator and critic Massimiliano Gioni.

Thierry De Cordier is showing some of the amazing seascapes he has been painting in recent years at home in Ostend, in which the sea looks like a dark, looming mountain. You might have seen some of these at the Brussels gallery Xavier Hufkens; new works have been added to the collection here in Venice.

At times as gloomy but often also playful are the drawings of Patrick Van Caeckenbergh. They contain trees that look like they’re lifted from a sinister fairytale. The artist, based in East Flanders, started this series three years ago and showed it in part last year during a retrospective of his work at Museum M in Leuven. Though the drawings keep evolving: Some of the trees look eerily anthropomorphic.

Vanmechelen & Fabre

Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys, collaborating video artists who had a retrospective earlier this year in Antwerp’s M HKA, present Das Loch (The Hole). I wasn’t able to see this short film in which figure three dummies with Styrofoam heads, but according to Shira Backer of the American Federation of Arts, writing in the catalogue, it “appears to play on stereotypes of Germanness”.

Apart from the central exhibition and the multitude of pavilions dedicated to different countries – Mark Manders, who has been living in Flanders for ages, is representing the Netherlands – the Venice Biennial is also a collection of smaller exhibitions, the so-called collateral events. Koen Vanmechelen, famous for his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, is part of Glasstress, an exhibition with only artworks in glass, and of Pavilion 0, “a transnational pavilion of a country which does not exist, of a common future, of utopia”.

In past editions, Jan Fabre simply organised his own, always worthwhile exhibition at Venice, but that isn’t the case this time around. Fabre fans don’t have to despair, though, since his work is present at Glasstress and at Wunderkamer.