M HKA Ensembles

° 1993

Born in Antwerpen (BE), lives in Antwerpen (BE).

Charline Tyberghein: wordplay on canvas

Painter Charline Tyberghein graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2018. That same year, she received the KoMASK jury prize as the best European master in painting from 14 European art academies. She is represented by Galerie Sofie Van de Velde, and her work has been shown in Belgium and abroad.

Her paintings can be described as absurd interventions in reality. Although playful in their simplicity, they conceal well-thought-through metaphors with a hint of humour and escapism in a nod to the rebellious tendencies of the quirky Brussels surrealists of the early 1930s. She sublimates banal objects and figurative symbols into independent artistic entities at the intersection of the tangible and the imaginary. Her paintings are best described as slow-looking exercises: the surfaces always contend with an underlying meaning, making them extremely complex in all their apparent simplicity.

Besides a surrealist twist, she uses old trompe l'oeil techniques to add relief and depth to the two-dimensional plane, creating misleading optical illusions of space and perspective in her tragic or alienating images. Recurring patterns such as checkerboards, lozenges, bricks and wood grain are repeated endlessly or deliberately isolated to hold the viewer's gaze longer.

Her sources of inspiration include art history and books on themes such as pictograms, road signs, the symbolism on tombstones, flags and coats of arms, and especially contemporary social media, which is teeming with symbols and pictograms. The artist maintains a structured visual database of screenshots of windows, bricks, cigarettes, hands, and all manner of patterns and structures that she later reworks on wood or canvas.  

The simplicity of her works betrays a calm, calculated approach. Tyberghein takes a systematic approach, using acrylic paint and lots of tape: "I enjoy making the works with simple, repetitive patterns the most. I measure everything in advance, prepare the composition with masking tape, and then paint it." There is no trace of expressive or explosive energy. "Once I start painting, I know almost exactly what the finished painting will look like." She builds up her work in layers and with repetitions in an incantatory fashion, like a therapeutical exercise. The end result holds the middle between the abstract and the figurative. The subtle but often unusual colours underscore her sense of humour. In keeping with the surrealist tradition, the titles she devises are part of the work. "If I create something that packs a punch, I add a funny title to restore the balance and offset the heavy message, making the melancholy contained in the work more bearable. Because there's only so much you can say about melancholy."

HW