Stefaan De Croock

Stefaan De Croock (1982) alias Strook is a Belgian contemporary artist. He mastered in fine arts at Sint-Lucas in Ghent. In 2011, he became a full-time artist. He has been expanding his boundaries ever since, both literally and figuratively as galleries in Stockholm, Miami, Bangkok, Montreal and Mexico City picked up and lauded his ever more layered and meaningful collages, sculptures, installations and paintings. The central theme of his oeuvre can be distilled to ‘time’, a given that has always inspired Strook. This is noticeable in his chosen raw work material: ‘old’ wood. He finds it at what he calls ‘non-places’: desolate, eerie locations where humans once intervened but that were left carelessly, recklessly, ruined. Think of a deserted monastery, a perished fishing boat or an abandoned bar. He collects and later uses scrap materials to form his monumental works. In doing so, the artist grants these objects a return to the human timeline and connects their past with a new future, location and purpose. “To me, the discarded materials are something magical. They possess a certain spontaneity that’s impossible to recreate. The colours, the paint, the relief. They form an esthetic imprint of everything that ever happened to the materials. You can ‘see’ time. It’s a privilege to be able to use it.” With this weathered wood, the artist constructs his famous ‘scrap wood faces’. Scarred fragments of old doors, patinated wooden floors, split or disintegrated garage doors become faceless, nameless silhouettes. Only expression remains. Powerful at first sight but astonishing when you understand the extra dimension the history of the wood adds. “I combine wood from places like the Imperial Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland with wood from a bar in Kortrijk and the medieval Saint Baafs Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. Every piece tells a unique story but all those stories form one human silhouette. It’s a metaphor as we are all an entity made up of different stories that shape