The uncompromising aesthetics of the works Bram Vanderbeke shows within the soil scenography have a distinctively raw and pristine quality. They remind of brute, natural forces and excavated remnants of long-gone buildings – although their compositions are contemporary and man-made, and their forms and surfaces are delicately handled and finished. As such, New primitives and Casted Objects both introduce an interaction between past and current and propose a present-day and personal take on brutalism.

Bram’s New Primitives – a combination of three separate horizontal elements, stacked on top of each other – are manually sculpted out of hefty concrete blocks. An intensive and physical process which is explicated by the scars on their surfaces. The usage of a grinding wheel and the finishes with specific pigments and waxes, relate with common techniques applied on natural stones and results in an equally natural look and feel.

Bram Vanderbeke deliberately challenges our perception and, in doing so, he questions the status of what is often referred to as the Anthropocene – understood as the way we affect the soils of our environments. Are these New Primitives the precursors of future archaeological findings? To accentuate this idea, the New Primitives shown in Milan are coated with a dark wax, giving them an aged and mysterious aspect.

But New Primitives is also a research into architectural constructions and, more specifically into the methods where a building’s stability is realized through the stacking of semi-identical, horizontal forms – present in both today’s and in primitive architecture, like the temples of Ankor Wat.

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