ABOUT

About painting

My paintings consist in a synthetic representation of elements from the urban and suburban territory. I use the vocabulary of a globalised landscape as a start from which I explore the notions of property, habitat and alterity in compositions that show hybrid places.

One of the driving forces behind my work is my personal experience as a Belgian citizen from a multicultural household and the feeling of not belonging to any place in particular.The same subjacent issues are the origin of every painting I make: I like to think of the landscape as a political painting subject in the sense that even if no human figure is visible, it is about people and the physical evidence of how we live together.

What interests me in the act of painting these elements of scenery is that by becoming the focus of attention they reveal human weaknesses. The distance involved by painting shows the efforts of a humanity that knows itself to be fragile and that tries to put a fence be￾tween itself and the world. A feeling of emptyness is also related to my works and I sense that it has something to do with the fragility mentionned above. This is what speaks to me.

I find it amusing to look for deep feelings in a lawn or a lamppost. I am fascinated by the importance of limits and boundaries in the way we think about space. In the past years I have been work￾ing with the motif of the fence as a strong symbol of the obstruction to the free movement of bodies. I have found in it an industrial object which, through its constant form, is part of a universal vocabulary.

Through time, fences and cages have remained present in my work, sharing the painting surface with other recurrent components such as plastic chairs and color palettes referring to thermal imagery used for war and hunting. As a result, there is an eerie feeling coming out of the canvas, like you could take a walk in a world of lost dogs and empty seats.