Location (5)

　Visiting Hans Op de Beeck’s pavilion even during the daytime, one enters a dark nighttime scene: a lifesized mise en scène of a black, elevated roadside restaurant with a panoramic view. From a seat at one of the small tables, visible through the picture windows is a nocturnal highway landscape that stretches off into the distance, lit only by distinctive orange streetlights. This “trompe l’oeil” landscape is, in reality, a sculptured landscape eleven meters deep and ten wide. The road’s surface rises at a nine-degree angle and the perspective is foreshortened as it moves toward the horizon (the first light around four meters high, the last only forty centimeters), thereby creating the illusion of a view that runs on for kilometers.
　Within the roadside restaurant itself, a crackling radio quietly plays strange tunes from the Seventies. Everything, down to the smallest detail, has been custom made in black, lending the interior a mysterious, almost ominous aura; the room, lit only faintly by hanging lamps, gives one the feeling of entering the restaurant after closing time. The restaurant is every bit as desolately empty as the massive highway landscape visible through the large, angled windows.

Photo: Hans Op de Beeck
Courtesy of Xavier Hufkens, Brussels