After working with the material for most of his professional life (albeit he is just 32), Jan de Cock wants to talk about something other than chipboard. ‘Would you ask Rubens why he uses oil paint?’, de Cock complains vociferously. It’s clear that a lot is at stake with this new exhibition, which he has been working on for nearly two years, and tensions are running high.

Titled, Repromotion, the show fills the main upper galleries of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and consists of a sequence of 100 complex sculptures – mostly made from chipboard, but also particleboard and laminate – that have been created in response to the architecture. The false ceiling that for 10 years lined Victor Horta’s 1928 building has been removed, allowing a cold, white light to flood the spaces. It makes the relationship between de Cock’s installations and the spaces, with their coffered ceilings and art deco details, even more direct: the work frames views of the space and can be read as an exercise in form- and space-making with overt references to 20th-century art movements such as de Stijl and Suprematism.

Horta’s building has a personal significance for de Cock because, when still in his twenties, he was nominated for the institution’s Young Belgian Painter’s Award. The following year, 2004, he created an installation in the restaurant, designing an inner skin as well as furniture and lighting.

Bringing viewers face to face with the roughness and tactility of real materials has always been significant in de Cock’s work. For a fit-out of the Commes des Garçons store in Tokyo, which I visited in 2005, customers had to brush uncomfortably against the rough edges of chipboard, installed in a relatively tight space. His work is always well-informed about its architectural setting and made specifically for it. At Tate Modern in 2005 installations appeared to burst out of the gallery to deal with the scale of the power station, and at MoMA New York in 2008, de Cock investigated the new Yoshio Taniguchi building and the inner workings of the institution.

While it is good to find an artist working so intelligently with architecture, there are many additional layers of meaning to de Cock’s work. Unfortunately, at Repromotion the complexity of these layered ideas threatens to overpower the integrity of the forms. Although the artist says that he doesn’t want to tell viewers what to think, there are coded messages, ready to be deciphered for anyone with a great deal of patience (and perhaps a degree in art history). The sequence of rooms begins with a memorial to the dead in the Kosovo civil war. I’m told that this actually has little to do with the specifics of Kosovo, but is a memorial for the history of the gallery space itself, and in particular the five sculptors who have previously exhibited here – symbolized by five wooden boxes fixed on the walls.

As if to underline this attempt to place himself in a continuity of great sculptors, de Cock has incorporated a series of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle casts of Hercules the Archer. On one level these provide a sense of scale to the work, making the constructions appear like room sets arranged around the dynamic figures. Symbolically, though, we’re supposed to read the archer’s act of shooting as a comment on photography, along with the use of daubed yellow paint (a reference to Kodak) and random, repeated photographs on the walls.

But the references in the show become still more obscure and complex. High on the walls above the chipboard structures are photos of pink flamingos, chosen because they seem artificial, although in fact the saturated colour is one of the few natural things in the show.

Other images appear randomly: the lavish interior of the Zimmerman House; a recent reconstruction of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and a pair of glass-clad towers that were reconstructed in Sarajevo following the war. Discerning what these visually disparate images have in common is like tackling a cryptic crossword. The clues are photography, repetition and reconstruction. But the specifics of Lloyd Wright or Sarajevo are as irrelevant as the dead Kosovans in the entrance hall – they are simply part of de Cock’s self-absorbed mind games.

De Cock has invented a word for his work, Denkmal, which is a combination of the Dutch words Denk, meaning thought, and mal, meaning mould: he thinks of his sculpture as literally ‘thought moulds’, and more than any of his previous work, Repromotion is about establishing de Cock as an intellectual, dealing with ideas rather than materials.

So what is the purpose of these intellectual hurdles? Certainly not to elucidate the situation in Kosovo; to shed light on the subject of photography, nor the validity of reconstructing historical artefacts: it’s actually all about the artist telling us how clever he is. Personally, I would prefer to enjoy the architecture and the chipboard.

Jan de Cock: Repromotion is at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels 25 June-13 September 2009. For more information visit www.bozar.be