On a walk with artist Denis Meyers: 'Art is part of life'

The artist who poured out his soul at the Solvay building with his insane and inimitable project “Remember Souvenir” is ready to be reborn. A journey through the smells, scars, folds, and memories of the city, in the footsteps of Denis Meyers.

"The European capital feels very far away here. This village atmosphere really appeals to a boy from Tournai like me,” Denis Meyers tells us on the site of the former fire station on the edge of Vossenplein/place du Jeu de Balle, a place where people trade in things that have lived many lives and cherish innumerable memories.

Denis Meyers used to visit the flea market with his grandfather, the phenomenal typographer Lucien De Roeck. “I still enjoy coming here, there’s PinPon, CHAFF, Foxhole on Vossenstraat/rue des Renards… I take my children there to teach them about recycling. We saved a floor made of small strips of wood from Solvay. My son loves Kapla.” Down the street, Meyers's mentor Jean-Luc Moerman has an exhibition at Bruno Montois. “I was his assistant for years. He stimulated me to trust my own abilities.”

“The vicissitudes of life led me to being alone,” Denis Meyers tells us as we walk down Hoogstraat/rue Haute. “It often was a lonely time at Solvay. Luckily I could occasionally count on the company of friends.” Like his compagnon de route Arnaud Kool, with whom he made the fresco for the Plate-Forme Prévention Sida. “You know, there is so much going on in the city, but our politicians prefer to stick their heads in the sand.”

Brussels is not the most graffiti tolerant place in the world, and Denis Meyers knows it. He first created his persos here, stickers with stylised faces, and is now exhibiting his typographical talent in these streets.

“Karine Lalieux still expresses a little bit of concern about the centre, but nothing whatsoever happens in Elsene/Ixelles. ‘Remember Souvenir’ attracted 25,000 visitors, but the mayor didn’t even bother to come and see. That is a shame because these kinds of projects forge relationships between people. I received letters from visitors who reconnected with their families after fifteen years, from a father who had changed jobs so that he could spend more time with his family… ‘Remember Souvenir’ turned out to be so much more than just street art.”

It's a family affair
“Don’t put yourself out for this guy!” one of the crew amiably laughs when we pass Pistolet Original, where Denis Meyers is a regular. Minutes later we pop into chef Giovanni Bruno’s starred restaurant Senzanome. What does he like about the fresco Denis Meyers made for him? “Nothing! He forced me into it. [Bursts out laughing] No, I love the liveliness of the handwriting, the personal way it communicates the history of our family.”

On boulevard Waterloolaan, we pass the Manalys jewellery shop, with which Denis Meyers also has a project in the pipeline. “I need diversity. I always have. Collaborating with the Laly Foundation, Kid Noize, Giorgio, Samsung, Audi… I love breaking out of my own sphere and my own studio. Art is part of life. Brussels has really opened my mind in that sense. I am increasingly open to things that are going on within me but which I would never even have wanted to recognise before. Sharing stuff, my feelings, the things that form me... But I am very grounded at the same time.”

You have to be when you are fuelled by the ephemeral. “I’m not worried about transience. What are humans sub specie aeternitatis? We’re passers-by. So we might as well enjoy life.”

Word up
“The pleasure I derive from writing is…indescribable,” Denis Meyers says when we reach Naamsepoort/Porte de Namur. “Words are so direct. But writing is also like painting to me, even if I do it with a marker or a ballpoint. It is form and content. Ever-changing. At the moment, I am living very much in the tension between the legible and the illegible, appearance and disappearance. To stimulate people to discover and unravel things for themselves. For me too, ‘Remember Souvenir’ was a discovery, a journey, a way of saying things and leaving other things unsaid.”

The words with which Denis Meyers tattoos the city’s skin, often the infinitives of verbs, exude magnificence. They realise the full potential of first words. “A conjugation has less power because it implies a time, an I and a you. If I write ‘courber’, some might think of a mathematical curve, a tree bending in the wind, while I think of René Char’s ‘Ne te courbe que pour aimer. Si tu meurs, tu aimes encore.’”

“Don't bend over, except to love.” We’re standing in front of the new mural that Denis Meyers painted on the façade of the Solvay building. “Yes, a final touch, by necessity. I painted spaces here that nobody else ever saw. I just felt that I had to do it. The same is true of this mural. The demolition is happening just behind that wall, so it won’t exist for long.”

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“But I don’t feel regret,” Denis Meyers says when we turn the corner and see the heavy machinery that is cutting the Solvay building to pieces. There is beauty in the destruction. “Absolutely, I think this is magnificent. I thought I knew the building like the back of my hand, but now that it has been cut open, the rooms don’t connect the way I thought they did. It is nice to see all the layers, the poetic fragments: like that one window with an untouched portrait, one survivor out of hundreds.”

The machines are switched off and for a moment, silence falls. On one of the walls, we can still see the word “Joy”, the name of Denis Meyers’s daughter. “You never know what life throws at you. In my case, things turned out very differently than I had hoped. Some of that suffering is in “Remember Souvenir”. This is my way of telling certain people that I love them. It’s symbolic, don’t you think, in a building that is destined to be demolished.” Like turning over a new leaf.

> Denis Meyers: Rebirth. > 21/05, Macadam Gallery, Brussels