To understand Job Smeets, a visionary artist who has no equal, I would suggest starting from his website, which tells more than a thousand words. Everything is spectacular, unique, questionable, quirky, opulent. In fact it’s the other side of modernity: the one which hybridizes banality and visions, technology and manual skills, pop and kitsch, humor and horror, function and dysfunction, museums and markets, awards and provocation. With a global success result.

And finally from Antwerp, after so many successful exhibitions, awards initiatives, you arrive in Milan…  
After living in Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, London...

To understand Job Smeets, a visionary artist who has no equal, I would suggest starting from his website, which tells more than a thousand words. Everything is spectacular, unique, questionable, quirky, opulent. In fact it’s the other side of modernity: the one which hybridizes banality and visions, technology and manual skills, pop and kitsch, humor and horror, function and dysfunction, museums and markets, awards and provocation. With a global success result.

And finally from Antwerp, after so many successful exhibitions, awards initiatives, you arrive in Milan…  
After living in Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, London, and long stays in the US Rebecca and I moved to Milan in 2018. It was a perfect moment with the city on an all-time high, full of creatives there in design, art fashion, theater, TV... and it was a scene and culture we immediately were welcomed into.
It was the perfect creative place for us to live and work, that is until Covid struck!

The extraordinary house in Milan is at the same time home, shop, gallery, studio, world. Your world, and your visions. Do you want to tell me about it?
Well it all happened in Milan, the sun was shining and we were all in a renaissance mood to party hard and work hard. Roads came together. I had a very "Non Modernist" creative attitude... doing the brand Blow with Seletti, working on a flurry of new creative collaborations, for example a new theater show inside the Trienniale Museum in Milan with the other ‘non-modernists’ Charley Vezza of Gufram, Maurizio Cattelan, Stefano Seletti (Seletti) and Pierpaolo Ferrari (photographer). But then at its height Covid struck and everything is in suspension.
Our house in Milan reflected the mood of the time. We would all hang out in this surreal space in this old classic building surrounded by my work... Mika, Charley Vezza, Paride Vitale, Maurizio Cattelan... the space was a perfect surreal balance of living, working and gallery in an elegy rant setting, looking out of the balconies across a typical Italian street absorbed totally into the light and sounds of the city.  

How to define your objects so eccentric, unique, hybrid, provocative, visionary mix of art and design, of past and future, of technology and craftsmanship?
It’s hard to define my work and it’s getting harder as years go by. Looking back I see I was heavily inspired by the Renaissance, and by Picasso reinventing himself seven times in his carreer. Styles and fields overlap in my world, they always did. Whether you sell in a shop or in a gallery it doesn’t influence the creative value of a product or object. We now all have learned  that a banana can be a piece of fruit, or a lamp or an art piece.  
I was never afraid of technology or extreme craftsmanship. Bit for me it’s never the core reason, these tools are available to visualize the idea as directly as possible but not to define it. Every creator uses its unique talents to visualize authentic work. "Whether you are a writer, dancer, actor, artist, architect or artist, you try to reveal some mystic truths" (Bruce Nauman).

The great mosaic objects for Bisazza in 2007 at Superstudio. Art that interacts with design. What do you remember of that memorable exhibition for us?
I met Piero Bisazza in Tokyo in 2006 where Studio Job had its first big "art interior" built inside the gallery as a "peepshow". To make a long story short, he invited Studio Job to compete with my friendly competitor ‘rising star’ at that time: Jamie Hayon and that annoyed me to be honest, it fired me up. I recall being very very late with my proposal and meanwhile I saw the flashy renderings of Hayon’s design, there was even a shoot in Wallpaper magazine of the piece in production. At that point I had nothing yet, only some abstract concepts. In that final pressure I hand sketched an ideas and submitted my A4 pen drawings alongside a real silver service set, and proposed "Silverware". A giant blow-up over scaled version of a iconic 17th century silver service you would find in Versailles. At that time I was working on a bronze sculptural collection called ‘Homework’ for Moss Gallery in New York which was about pots and pans; elevating the every day humble object, a follow up collection to "Craft" based on farmhouse objects. Bisazza was the opposite of this rudimentary approach to pots and pans, so I wanted to celebration the icon. What I liked about silver crafting is when you hammer it into shape you get this uniform textured finish in the structure, so I took the white-gold tiles from the Bisazza collection and recreated this hammered finish with the tiles. For the final piece the scale was exaggerated in an extraordinary way, the viewer feels so small and insignificant. Silverware has themes of domination and class, you would impress guests with a silver service in your dining room, a status symbol of your wealth or success, a showpiece that tells the visitor who you are. This silver service is maybe and idea of what I felt like at the time.