In Congo Brass (after Henry Van de Velde), Lyndon Barrois Jr. interrogates the visual language of Belgian Art Nouveau through the lens of colonial history. The painting takes its design from packaging for Tropon, a protein powder developed in the late nineteenth century by Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde, whose work helped define the movement’s distinctive decorative vocabulary. Barrois translates the original graphic into painting, altering its colours and introducing a palette inspired by the interiors of Victor Horta.

The work engages with art historian Debora L. Silverman’s research into the colonial entanglements of Belgian modernism. In Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism (2011–13), Silverman argues that the movement’s organic forms and decorative motifs were unconsciously shaped by the extraction economy of rubber and ivory that defined the Congo Free State under King Leopold II, an era now widely documented for its brutality toward the Congolese population. Two elements placed over the painting extend this inquiry into the ways objects acquire authority. Resembling the colour cards, scales and charts used in museum documentation and archiving, they evoke the systems through which collections establish value and authenticity. Yet these same tools also appear in archaeology, forestry and forensic investigation. In the context of Barrois’s practice of making copies and fakes, their presence further complicates the distinction between original and reproduction, evidence and interpretation. By revisiting these designs and the systems through which they are identified and valued, Barrois draws attention to the uneasy relationship between modernist beauty, material wealth and the colonial structures that helped create them.