Transhumanism by Alexander Antoon Huybrechts

In the absence of drawing paper Alexander as a young child painted on the wallpaper of his parental home. He felt a great urge to express himself through his ability to visualize things.
On November 10, 1932, in the morning at nine o'clock he was born in a small polder village called Oorderen, near Antwerp city.
During the great economic depression, in the thirties of the last century and WW II, life was frugal. “Work hard”, the motto of this period, left the Huybrechts family little time to spend with their children. Despite the sobriety there were also holidays, one of which was colored by the birth of his brother who was three years younger than he.
The years of war were relatively peaceful in the countryside. Of course the people in Oorderen became aware of the horrors and torments caused by the war. When on August 6, 1945, almost a year after the liberation of Belgium, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were attacked with an nuclear bomb and the consequences became visible, 13-year-old Alexander was deeply shocked. He couldn’t let go of the fact that people were able to do this to each other.

After the war reconstruction works had started in Belgium and Alexander after leaving the municipal school delivered his share. His love for wood, wood structures and woodwork were reason enough to get started as a student carpenter. He was a fast and diligent student, making him a carpenter after a few years. His income was good, allowing him to set aside money for his own future and save some money for his sister who was born in one of the post-war years. In the meantime Alexander was hoping that somewhere in the future the time would come in which he could give way to his artistic ambitions.

In 1950 he received a call as a conscript for the Belgian army to sign up at "the small castle in Brussels" for the three-day selection tests. During these days, Alexander gave his preference for the navy and was found fit for it. Hoping to see more of the world on his beloved water he received his march command, his train ticket and left for St. Kruis in Bruges where he was stationed for two years. Little is known about this period in his life, perhaps he spent his time as a sailor on a navy ship that transported Belgian and Luxembourg volunteers to Korea.

Second left, Alexander

After his service, he met Louisa and married her on May 26, 1957. They settled in Ekeren a suburb of Antwerp.
Their first child, Marc, was born in November 1957. Alexander who never went to church wasn’t present at his sons baptism. Nevertheless he thought being baptized was very important for his son otherwise the village community wouldn’t accept him.
At the end of the fifties, Alexander was given the opportunity to work in Egypt and help to improve the Suez canal. An attractive salary and housing for him and his family were part of the offer but because of the unstable situation in that part of the world he decided not to put his wife and child at risk and remained in Belgium.
In the following years, Alexander worked as a carpenter at the quay of the industrial dock and other docks which were part of the expansion and renewal of the Antwerp port. Oorderen and Wilmersdonk were sacrificed and offered a surreal view.

Roofs without tiles, bare skeletons.

Nowadays, the church tower of Wilmersdonk can still be found between the containers in the Antwerp port. For a while Alexander worked in New Wallonia because there was a great need for skilled professionals. His merits were excellent.

The family Huybrechts rejoiced in March 1962 when baby daughter Ingrid was born.
This was the moment Alexander made up his mind. He was happily married, had two lovely children and a good income. What was he waiting for?
The boss of his sister-in-law, his wife's sister, was very impressed with his work and had said to him, "You should go to the academy." That was exactly what Alexander was planning. He signed up at the art academy and was accepted. In the evening, he took lessons in drawing and painting.
His friends and colleagues were amazed and wondered about his choice being a laborer just like them. They didn’t understand such aspirations.
His wife Louisa backed him. She understood that he needed to express, what moved him inwardly. He was a passionate man.

Alexander wanted to create something to preserve his impressions. Through his great imaginary powers, he was able to capture his experiences by painting. He was proud of his work. United in him were a very hard worker and an excellent artist with a great will-power.
Louisa, on the other hand, had a strong need to go out with her family. She wanted sociability. Through her work she came into contact with colleagues who could partly provide in this need. Alexander didn’t like to spend his time talking about the weather, cars and holidays. This topics didn’t touch his deep inner life. A very exceptional event took place at the end of the sixties, this beeing that he went with family and friends to Blankenberg at the seaside for a holiday.
In the meantime, in order to be able to work undisturbed, he had paneled and beamed the entire attic. An easel and drawing table completed his studio.

On Sundays he went to the attic to paint or draw.

In nineteen seventy, Alexander started his new job as a maintenance worker at the Elisabeth hospital in Antwerp. There was a nurse who liked him a bit too much. She insisted to go out with him. He did not want to be rude so he devised the next plan. He asked his wife then 35-years-old to come all dressed up to the hospital together with their daughter Ingrid. After this the nurse left him alone.
Alexander’s means of transport to the hospital were his moped. One day he drove past a car whose driver opened the door without looking into the side mirror and pushed Alexander off his moped. After this accident he came home with blood all over his face. He felt there was nothing wrong with him but his wife was terrified and insisted he would never go by moped to his work again.
During this period, Alexander had come to know a group of people who like him were very engaged in art. His friend Herman opened a "New Age" store in Antwerp. Alexander was amongst the invitees and his children came along. The opening was performed by Armand Pien, a meteorologist, well known of the weather forecast on television.
Herman made pyramids with the size of a hut. People could sit inside and meditate which was fashionable in these years. One of the axis being aimed at the north had a very positive influence on the meditating person.
Tarot cards, pendants, telescopes and the like, also literature on astrology, astronomy, psychology and "Bres" magazine with articles about new age and painting came across in this store.
Here Alexander became acquainted with George Orwells book 1984 about a dystopic world. A winged statement by psychologist Carl Gustav Jung; " I am enough of an artist to draw feeling upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world", found great resounding in Alexander.

Nineteen seventy was also the year in which Alexander’s first surrealistic paintings saw the light. Experimenting a lot searching for ways to express himself through his imaginary ability the inexhaustible source that existed in his own inner world.
Artists interpret new things that will come to pass through their inspiration and imagination.
Giving us a glimpse into his deepest inner being sharing with us his talents, his passions but also his hindrances and fears.
From the beginning of our evolution, these archetypical contents are an inseparable part of the subconscious side of our mind.
Consider the books of Jules Verne. Describing traveling around the earth, traveling to the moon, twenty thousand miles below sea which was impossible in his lifetime. In the twentieth century many of these impossibilitie have recently become possible. Looking at this kind of developments shows that there are people who have antennas and therefore know what will happen in the future. Alexander was such a person.

Alexander painted a lot of female nude, a highly loved theme which he often pictured in his paintings. It were typical women. They all wore their hair in the same style and they were often colored blue, presumably not having an own identity because of their artificial intelligence. One of his first paintings depicts a beautiful female. The women are portrayed as mysterious, proud, innocent, lustful, oppressed, astronauts or priestesses, males are portraited as tough and seen in many ways as, astronauts, warriors, prophets, mutants and even Icarus.

Alexander

On the back of his paintings he made many notes showing us the things that captivated him. Expressionism in particular German expressionism around nineteen ten and twenty such as Max Beckmann which had Alexander’s preference when he was young. To be noticed in his somewhat dark paintings and nudes. He was impressed by surrealism and had a fancy for Magritte and Dali.

He also loved abstract art, mainly his pen drawings vary from surrealism to abstract. One of his favorites was a Flemish painter and sculptor, Constant Permeke in the thirties and forties. He painted in dark and brown tones but very expressive. He was also inspired by Dali who painted very refined and everything in detail. He also found inspiration in painters such as Delvaux, Kokoschka, Miro, Rouault, and Ernst. In Alexander’s oeuvre we find a number of surprises, "strange works" that demonstrate his great inventiveness and imaginary abilities, making his work very captivating and interesting.

For the development of his children he considered art important. In the early seventies he planned a three-day trip to Amsterdam, with his wife and children. There they visited many museums.
When his son Marc was about fifteen years old he started to show a lot of interest in his father’s paintings and in the art of painting, which led Alexander to take him to exhibitions.
It was a period of great bloom.

One of Alexander’s friends also a painter was raised by patrons. He had gone through a lot. He didn’t grow up in a safe environment a fate he shared unfortunately with many orphans.
On a Sunday Alexander and his wife and daughter Ingrid who was about nine years old visited this friend. They were sitting together in his living room where some of his paintings were hanging on the walls. These were big black-gray artworks with scary men. Ingrid didn’t dare to move because the paintings paralyzed her. This man had suffered a lot during his stay with the patrons and gave testimony of his suffering through these paintings.

During the seventies and eighties many of Alexander’s paintings express peoples moods and the world in which they live. It was a time of gloomy prospects. Unemployment, cold war, nuclear threats including the disaster in Chernobyl. Alexander was particularly grasped by the atomic threat and interpreted this by depicting mutants in a mutated environment asking: "What’s wrong with us, what are we up to as mankind?"
A concern that shows Alexander's humanitarian views. In search of a way out, he takes us on an exploration of other galaxies to find habitable planets. On other canvases we find female and male figures which he painted in blue colors. Did he want to show us that by mixing the different races a new race is emerging? The "blue race".

Their Dog Hector was part of the Huybrechts family. Alexander walked with him every evening near a lake in the neighborhood. First, he would make the dog enthusiastic by saying, "let's go," then he slowly rolled a cigarette while the dog was jumping enthusiastically around him. One evening he arrived home without Hector. The dog didn’t obey him at all. Louisa came along to pick up the dog. She called for Hector and seconds later there he was. Hector made it very clear that she was in charge.

Louisa had to undergo surgery during this period. Louisa after surgery was in the hospital for fourteen days. Home again she wanted to have an early night and went to bed finding to her utter amazement Hector on her side of the bed. Usually he slept on the landing but during her absence he had conquered her bedside. Alexander didn’t have the heart to send him away. That’s how gentle he was a man.

After the children left home to live on their own a fourteen year old boy came to Alexander on Sunday afternoons for drawing lessons. He was delighted to give these lessons and was committed to people who shared his love for art.

With his wife he moved to Zandvliet in nineteen ninety two. Some days he went out and about making sketches of inspiring things he encountered which resulted in a new painting. Frames for his paintings were handmade by Alexander. He painted many futuristic landscapes often with abstract elements, translating everything from his inner being. Some of his art-works show affinity with the Cobra style after WW II. Painting out of free will directly on canvas as other abstract expressionists did.

On a regular basis Alexander and Louisa went to exhibitions with a befriended older couple. On invitation Alexander went to a museum but only, in his opinion, if the exhibition was worth the visit, a Rubens exhibition for example. The Kröller-Müller museum in Otterloo in the Netherlands had a lot to offer a reason why it attracted Alexander.

Alexander could be immensely irritated by what he saw as the "stupidity" of people who could not fathom or appreciate the beauty of art.. Brushing their cars and mowing their lawns every Saturday was small-mindedness at the very least.
After the purchase of a Mondriaan painting by the Dutch government for 80 million florins in response a television crew interviewed all kinds of people asking about their opinion. They gave answers in the sense of: “I wouldn’t even like it as a tablecloth”, or: “With such an amount of money we could do so many other things”, this annoyed Alexander immensely while Mondriaan wasn’t even his style. However he appreciated that a country was willing to pay a lot of money for such a powerful artwork and exhibit it in a museum.

Nowadays an artist with potential whether it's a musician, sculptor or painter has a manager who ensures that he gets the attention. Alexander organized his exhibitions all by himself. In Ekeren in a gallery, at the Meir in Antwerp, in Merksem and in the shop of a friend in Antwerp. Among these paintings were a lot of surrealistic ones which he sold regularly. During the nineties he organized various exhibitions at Ravenhof Castle in Putte Kapellen, Belgium. A lovely ancient location with a big entrance hall, large rooms and beautiful surrounding gardens.

Alexander during one of his exhibitions at Ravenhof Castle
Sometimes he exhibited together with Marc, his son, who painted as well. Children of a friend of Marc played music on these occasions. Friend Herman performed the festive opening of the exhibitions knowing that Alexander didn’t like to be in the center of attention. A lot of visitors came along. Once at such an occasion a wealthy German art critic bought a painting by Alexander. So did the municipality of Ekeren. People were captured by the extraordinary in his paintings, therefore he sold more paintings. He received recognition.
Around the turn of the century, Alexander had a greater urge to paint, as if time was short, while he was driven to capture so much more on canvas. This resulted in a huge number of mainly small paintings in a variable design. He was in doubt to go completely for one style. In his work he kept searching for the right interpretation. Gradually he let go of structure and started to draw and paint offhand. Don’t think but do. Resulting in amorphous forms.
During the last years of his life several paintings are characterized by the disease that overpowered him, ‘cancer.’ He interpreted his suffering, knowing, the end of my life is near. These fascinating paintings are masterfully displayed in all diversity and inextricably linked to the process of life he was going through.
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Alexander passed away on November 4, 2007, 6 days before his 75e anniversary.

Self portrait.
After his death Louisa destroyed a lot of paintings and some self-portraits of Alexander as a young man. Also his logbook in which he described his works and many pen drawings. His work made him partly unreachable for her. His creative expression being her great rival.
Granddaughter Laura came up with the idea to publicize and sell her Grandfather’s work.

Alexander during one of his exhibitions at Ravenhof Castle.

Sometimes he exhibited together with Marc, his son, who painted as well. Children of a friend of Marc played music on these occasions. His friend Herman performed the festive opening of the exhibitions knowing that Alexander didn’t like to be in the center of attention. A lot of visitors came along. Once at such an occasion a wealthy German art critic bought a painting by Alexander. So did the municipality of Ekeren. People were captured by the extraordinary in his paintings, therefore he sold more paintings. He received recognition.

Around the turn of the century, Alexander had a greater urge to paint, as if time was short, while he was driven to capture so much more on canvas. This resulted in a huge number of mainly small paintings in variable designs. He was in doubt to go completely for one style. In his work he kept searching for the right interpretation. Gradually he let go of structure and started to draw and paint offhand. Don’t think but do. Resulting in amorphous forms.
During the last years of his life several paintings are characterized by the disease that overpowered him, ‘cancer.’ He interpreted his suffering, knowing, the end of my life is near. These fascinating paintings are masterfully displayed in all diversity and inextricably linked to the process of life he was going through. The acceptance of the pain and suffering, so much of a specifically feminine quality, shows that Alexander was in balance, reconciled with his fate, accomplished his task.

Alexander passed away on November 4, 2007, 6 days before his 75e anniversary.