Humanist artist Blaise Patrix palms Hotel Hilton Brussels Grand Place
The collaboration project between the hotel and Brussels-based artists is entering its second edition. Blaise Patrix will exhibit some 30 works for a year. The painter wants to give a distinctly multicultural look to the hotel’s various spaces. At the same time, he wants to invite the 75 employees of the Hilton Brussels Grand Place, as well as Belgian and foreign hotel guests, to an exchange of views on this hybrid, heterogeneous oeuvre.
His work will hang on various walls of the hotel for a year. For this exhibition, the artist, together with hotel manager Ellen Deboeck, has selected some 30 stylistically diverse paintings from different time periods. It is, as it were, a retrospective of a hybrid, rich oeuvre starting in the 1990s.
Thanks to the QR code next to each painting, hotel guests can learn about the artist’s universe and the canvases hanging on the wall.
Throughout his career, Blaise Patrix has created monumental frescoes in cocreation with others. The collaboration with the Hilton Brussels Grand Place allows him to continue this approach by meeting hotel staff and engaging in a lively, inspiring dialogue with them. The artist has also created a portrait of Vincent Masson, Sentro’s chef. On the restaurant’s menu, guests will be able to see the result of this encounter with the chef, as well as a presentation of the works on display. Moreover, the chef’s dishes are freely inspired by this acquaintance.
Blaise Patrix
Originally from France, artist Blaise Patrix has received exhibitions with his own creations in France, as well as in the United States and Senegal. He has also been organising so-called “Socia(B)le Art” projects for 20 years by working with local people, as well as vulnerable individuals and communities to whom he gives a voice through art. The artist is an avid traveller. This is how he fell in love with Africa, where he lived and worked for 20 years. He loves turning up where he is not expected. For him, creating is a means of starting conversations.
“What I find interesting is cultivating and valorising public and collective recognition; such recognition fosters sensitivity, emotion, intuition and creativity. As the philosopher Édouard Glissant very aptly said, ‘To be is to change by exchanging thoughts with the other, while remaining oneself’.”
