Located in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium, in front of the building of the Communauté Française, De Vaartkapoen, a permanent piece of street art, created in 1985 by talented and imaginative Belgian artist Tom Frantzen, depicts a comical situation in which a policeman in old-style uniform with his hands outstretched is trying to prevent himself from falling flat on his face, because a miscreant, a canal rascal, popping out of a manhole, has grabbed his ankle.

De Vaartkapoen, which literally means channel rascal, is made up of two Dutch words, in which Vaart stands for a channel and Kapoen for insolent. The person who appears from the sewer opening on the footpath, just behind the policeman, is a vaartkapoen or a rogue in the channel. Although comical, the sculpture represents the idea of overthrowing authority.

The scene is straight out of the comic series ‘Quick and Flupke’, featuring two mischievous boys, created by the famous Belgian cartoonist Hergé, the creator of the famous cartoon characters, Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus and others.

However, the sculpture represents the idea of overthrowing authority and through it the artist wanted to represent the youth causing authority to waver, which apparently has its origins in the dockworkers of the country who, long ago, rose in strong protest against the government for multiple grievances.

Born in 1954 in Brussels and studied at the National School of Architecture and Visual Arts, La Cambre in Brussels, Tom Frantzen describes himself as a contemporary Flemish fantasy artist. In his De Vaartkapoen, he stages a signifying little scene on two levels - the level of the sewers, which lead into the canal and the level of the pavement, complete with a lamppost, the cobblestones and the manhole cover.

The low level features the Vaartkapoen, representing a young rebel, topples over a policeman higher up, symbolising overthrowing his authority. It seems, like a still picture, the two characters have elegantly turned into bronze and remained so forever, leaving the rest of the scene to our imagination.