PORTRAIT Painting

I live in Brussels, I am a painter and painting teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts. The subject of my artworks is existentialist portrait, identity . In my paintings, the eyes are most often masked or unworked if you prefer. A theme as the hybridization of commercial and popular images drawn from the media and copy-paste for the realization of portraits such as evocations. The masks, here are made as pseudo-collages ( “pretended” cut collage but painted) The mask is a recurring motif, symptom, anachronistic displaced thing. It is a conceptual reminiscence. Mask is something, a form, that returns through cultures and ages and survives its own death. There is something pathetic about the masks which are like “capable of anything”. Painted as a collage in the artwork it creates a particular spatiality, enhancing the geology of the construction and the mutating aspect of someone as well. Combining intimism with hyper-mediated production, abstraction and figuration, the gesturality of pasta and the almost watercolored descriptive form.it highlights the construction assembly of various faces, various aspects of someone. From time to time a thick gestures of paint paste, traces; pink or black impasto, symbolic on a deliberately very fine, airy and flat material. The gesture erasing the eyes transforming the face in an effigy . Elsewhere, an insulating invading space, of almost monochrome colors, enveloping the subject, the background and the figure becoming entangled with a sort of melancholy . Appearance, identity, the subject is elsewhere, beyond representation. Colorfull flowers , animals furs as playfull figures surrounding and invading the human figure as a hope.