Ianchelevici (1909-1994) was a man of small stature, but he sometimes fashioned giants. The great Belgo-Romanian sculptor, it is true, had an innate feeling for the monumental. “To exhaust its meaning and bear witness to human genius,” he told me, “An open-air statue must be of large size, for the surrounding nature already eats half of it.” The Diver, made in 1939 in Liège is two and a half metres high; L’Appel (1939), in La Louvière, reaches four metres and Le Verbe (1955), in Sint-Niklaas, five metres. To cite just three examples… These sculptures impress by their size, but also by the power that emanates from them: it is not for nothing that Julien de Borman and Sébastien Willemyns (Flygmaskin) drew part of their inspiration from them.

The musical creation, the best tracks of which we discover here, will also be a milestone. While the two musicians were touched by Ianchelevici’s wild – and sometimes proud – need to commemorate the collective event in a big way, they were not insensitive to the flame that the sculptor awakened in them thanks to his impressive series of smaller works, brought together since 1987 at the Mill – the Ianchelevici Museum in La Louvière. Because it was there, while wandering for hours among these magnificent sculptures, that they conceived their music and extracted the most explicit rhythms. Bringing together these two modes of artistic expression, sculpture and music, is an extraordinary aesthetic gamble that Ian would not have disavowed. It was a challenge; it paid off. Today, this allows us to listen to the astonishing interactions that can arise, happily, between the harmonious immateriality of the sounds and the expressiveness of the sculpted forms, between the viola or the diatonic accordion of the musicians and the sculptor’s chisel.

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