Roland Junck at his Swiss home next to one of his artworks, a mannequin of a Chinese woman
Roland Junck, surrounded by mock-ups of the comic book that he is designing, sits at a dining room table that is not quite normal. the table, seemingly straight, draws the eye towards one wall of windows in his glass-box mansion, which commands a panoramic view of Lake Zurich. A photographic masterpiece by Marina Abramovic aligns with the table. the house has all the controlled emptiness and vibrancy of a contemporary art gallery.
But its clean lines are deceptive. From end to end, the long table veers about 15 degrees off-centre. the visitor soon realises that two walls of the dining room are bent at the same angle as the table and, indeed, the whole house follows. It is not a box at all. this effect pleases Junck, chief executive of the world’s biggest zinc producer. “It comes back to my favourite subject, which is what is true and what is not,” he said. “I like illusion.”
His company Nyrstar moved to Zurich a year ago. In 2009, he took on the chief executive role “almost as a hobby,” he says, believing he could turn round the company. “Career-wise, it was not necessary.”
The Luxembourg native had finished a long career in the steel industry. he was an executive at Spain’s Aceralia and its successor, Arcelor. when Arcelor merged with India’s Mittal Steel in 2006, Junck became ArcelorMittal’s first chief executive before steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal took the job for himself.
Junck talks about price-earnings ratios and smelting technologies with ease but he says he is an artist as much as a company man. “My last exposition of photography was titled after a Spanish poem, saying, ‘Nothing is true/ nothing is a lie/ It all depends on the colour of the glass that you look through.’ That is fundamentally what I still believe,” he says. he refers to a 2009 exhibition in Brussels, the seventh showing of his photography.
In his “first phase” as a photographer, he depicted piles of corroded steel and other work-related scenes. “It had to do with you seeing things differently when you changed the angle or the distance from something,” he says. “This has a strong connection to business. If you always look at things the same way, you see the same things.”
His habit of searching out new angles, he says, helped him persuade Nyrstar that it should become a mining company as well as a zinc-smelting company. Nyrstar is on an acquisition spree for zinc mines.
His second photographic phase was portraiture. For years, Junck photographed anyone with whom he came in contact. Leading high-level trips to buy Chinese steel mills for Arcelor, he ran into problems photographing Chinese officials such as the deputy prime minister. “The Chinese have a special humour. you need to spend a lot of time explaining why you want to do something like that,” he says.
The zen minimalism of the Junck house could seem cold if not for a collection of contemporary Chinese art – the legacy of much travel to that country – and European photography. Two works by Karen Knorr, a London-based photographer, depict Indian scenes of tigers and temples. the Abramovic photograph shows a Madonna-esque woman suspended in space above a church-like kitchen. “The interiors of Catholic churches have always fascinated me. I am attracted by darkness, by half-light.”
But none of Junck’s photographs hang in his Swiss house. “I am now in the new phase. so I don’t want to see the old ones.”
His new phase is comics. Junck has launched a project at an unusual intersection of corporate team-building and pop art. he aims to strengthen Nyrstar’s identity by documenting its 2011 in comic-book form. All the comic book’s panels are based on photos that he modifies on Photoshop to resemble a Superman or Tintin adventure. he takes most of the photos himself but staff are encouraged to send in theirs too.
He shows mock-up cartoons based on photos of his trips to Peru, where Nyrstar has bought a mine. “I want to make sure that people understand what the company has been doing in a different form than an annual report,” he says. “By its nature, a cartoon may be a much better way to explain the story.”
The comics will delve into history. They will try to show employees that the company’s assets have colourful stories that continue despite the new name. Its recently acquired Mexican mine, he says, supplied the silver coins for the Zapatistas during the Mexican revolution. “My main work internally is to make sure this company becomes a real company. to do that, we need a sense of identity, of shared views and execution. Photography is a form of interpretation. I am interpreting that identity.”
Junck, an unusually postmodern industrialist, reiterates that nothing is absolutely true. Perception, whether of a room’s shape or an organisation’s history, guides our sense of how things are.
When he and his wife Françoise, a lawyer, arrived in Zurich, they did not seek out this temple of modernism. Their house in Luxembourg is converted from a 14th-century mill. But when they viewed the Thomas Wild-designed house in the hills above Zurich and saw its potential, they set about transforming it like professional project managers. “This is a real project,” he says. up to 30 workers were involved in the recently completed refurbishment. “Project management is not an easy thing. It starts with a philosophy, a strategy, but then it needs someone to put that to music.”
Françoise was the house’s project manager as her husband seemed to have spent the year on aircraft. she walks through the house like a curator, explaining the Chinese art collection. the interior is offset by a glass-walled courtyard that punctuates the space like the hole of a doughnut. this glassy interior allows almost every room of the house to be viewed from any point on two floors. “This makes it liveable for two people,” she says. “It is a large house but we can always see what each other is doing. It becomes more intimate.”
The house has a lawn perched above Lake Zurich. It cries out for entertaining but the Juncks have not yet had a party. “He has not been here long enough to do that,” Françoise says.
William MacNamara is the FT’s mining correspondent
