Jonas Vansteenkiste

the Latin title immediately tells the story: Orarum fracta, fractus domum, fractured Landscape, Fractured home.

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In his sculptural installation, Jonas Vansteenkiste presents a model of a fragmented villa embedded within a stylized landscape—an evocative ruin caught between construction and decay. This work, while modest in scale, unfolds a layered narrative of the human impulse to domesticate, possess, and aestheticize nature, and the inevitable resistance of nature to such impositions. The villa, once a monument of control and taste, now appears as a fragile trace, abandoned or overtaken—its edges blurred by the slow yet persistent reclamation of the environment.

Vansteenkiste’s model resonates strongly with the paradox outlined by Kristof Reulens in his reflection on Belgian landscape painters Emile Van Doren and Armand Maclot. These artists, active around the fin de siècle, immortalized the natural world through their idyllic landscapes and were vocal advocates of nature preservation. Yet, their decision to anchor themselves permanently within the very wilderness they celebrated—by constructing large villas—reveals a contradiction at the heart of their legacy. Their homes, designed to be in harmony with nature, ultimately altered and claimed that same nature for private comfort and aesthetic control.

It is precisely this tension—between reverence and possession, celebration and domestication—that Vansteenkiste crystallizes in his ruinous villa. The work does not moralize, but stages a quiet, poignant reflection on human presence in the landscape. The ruin becomes a temporal marker, suggesting that all forms of ownership are temporary, that architecture too must eventually submit to entropy, erosion, and return.

In a broader sense, the piece touches on themes of nostalgia and idealization. The villa in ruin speaks not only to physical decay, but also to the crumbling of ideological constructs: the belief that humans can fully shape or fix meaning into a place. The model is at once a remnant of past ambitions and a monument to their failure—its poetic charge lies precisely in that ambivalence.

Through this sculptural gesture, Vansteenkiste contributes to a long tradition of artistic dialogue with the landscape. However, rather than depict or glorify it, he materializes the traces of conflict and contradiction that structure our relationship to it. The villa, diminished and incomplete, becomes a metaphor for the limits of mastery, and a reminder that nature is never a passive backdrop, but a force with agency—capable of both accommodating and undoing us.