Navigating through an inhumane time, a WW2 teenager could speak for hours about his experience decades later. It had a tone of trauma, laughter, despair and resilience. Jean’s voice carried the freedom-fighter “Never give up” message while sawing and nailing together wooden frames for the paintings I made on cut out canvas held by my mother’s floors. He showed us how to paint a board to look like marble, how to fix a chair, a door or a window-frame.
He was our unusual babysitter when my mother had to rush to work, dug in the garden and often trimmed her hedge and lawn before she had even time to realize it was time to do it. I could have given up a thousand times a day in those days, but the infamous Der Adolf Hitler checking out a shop in place Bizet, the “chemises noires” and the “chemises blanches”, the stealing coal and sausages from the Nazi reserveS and so many more massive hits disc would never allow it to happen.
Jean was also a good dancer and could stand on his huge working class hands. A feat, for his age. We weren’t sure if it was polio that got his spine to twist so badly or his early working days, carrying massive concrete slabs with an underfed body.
He made paintings out of the postcards we’d send him during our summer holidays and from his own travels, detailed the colours and shades under one of his interesting hats. Sitting in front of his house, he’d take in the sun and talk with the passersby, doing his best to make the place feel better while needles could be found in the nearby park. He became a reason to love peace. I don’t know how the neighbourhood got the La Roue (the wheel) name nor who broke Jean’s heart when stealing his car. Practice-forgiveness-on-an-everyday-basis, I know, but it took me ages to forgive that unknown creep because our life-changing neighbour went a bit downhill after that.
Football in Anderlecht was amazing without the money, cycling too, and one could swim in the canal back in the 1930s.
Another Brussels appeared and disappeared in a small street called after a social victory: the eight hour working day. La rue des Huit Heures. Reminding us that a time without weekends and summer holidays existed when children barely being able to read and write had to leave school to work. Jean was born in 1926 and work was hard to be able to eat more of those potatoes from the fields of Flanders that dried up in newspapers* in attics, preventing the light from making them inedible.
Old age got him to sit in an old folks home chair, he reached 93 watching the stars. And maybe became a real one.
Jean exhibited once, shortly after the war. I’ve been wanting to show a duo for ages… Glad this ODAJEAN exhibition and homage could Happen!
* a newspaper story with heartwarming effects during ww2 is the “faux soir” one. Not to be missed (in FRENCH, a PROGRAM: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/affaires-sensibles/affaires-sensibles-du-mardi-07-juin-2022-9399131 ABOUT it).
Thanks to Gabo Van Dyck for pictures made during the Carte de Visite exhibition!
chameleonian times 
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