Houyoux / Belgium / 20th century
Three
ways of writing
reality.
Maurice Houyoux, twentieth-century modernist architect. George Houyoux, passionate literary publisher. Léon Houyoux, luminist painter and portraitist.
Three figures from one family: an architect, a publisher and a painter. Three autonomous disciplines, yet one shared way of questioning form, transmission and light.
DiscoverLine,
light,
language.
In twentieth-century Belgium, Léon Houyoux, George Houyoux and Maurice Houyoux each stood out in a distinct field: painting, publishing and architecture. Three perspectives, three ways of inhabiting the world, each in his own manner.
Léon Houyoux, uncle of Maurice and George, studied under Jean François Portaels at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, alongside Fernand Khnopff, James Ensor and François Halkett. He was 39 when George Houyoux, the youngest of his nephews, was born, and almost 80 when George published Contes d’Horace Van Offel, the first masterpiece of the Éditions des Artistes: a luxurious edition illustrated by Belgian artists of the interwar period.
Léon reached out to George and passed on a richly filled address book: James Ensor, but also Léon Spilliaert, Théo Van Rysselberghe, Louis Buisseret, Edgar Tytgat…
Maurice Houyoux left an architectural legacy shaped by functionality, aesthetics and adaptation to context. Spatial and programmatic constraints are the starting point of the architectural project, but they must also be the elements from which the artistic sensitivity of space emerges.
3H video presentation.
