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Ensemble: Window on Infinity - Room 04

Photo: Christine Clinckx / M HKA
Photo: Christine Clinckx / M HKA

Non-plastic painting

 

Jef Verheyen explores the canvas as an experience space. He describes his style as ‘non-plastic painting’. Thanks to the translucent layers of paint he applies one above the other, it is as if he is painting with air. The brushstrokes are barely visible in his atmospheric landscapes. In these dark, hazy environments, a cosmic silence predominates. Vibrations seem to set the spaces in static motion. Verheyen’s technique of building up paint in translucent layers is centuries old. Jan van Eyck applied it in in his oil paintings in the fifteenth century. Le Peintre Flamant aims to refine the technique in dematerialised ‘portraits’ of dark and light.

‘When I first exhibited in Milan and told visitors that I came from the same country as Van Eyck, Memling, Van der Weyden, Van der Goes and Rubens, they were astonished. To my Italian friends and acquaintances I was instantly Jef Verheyen, “un giovane pittore fiammingo”. In my work they recognised the continuation of what they find typical of la pittura fiamminga: light and space.’

Jef Verheyen, ca. 1970

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