Henri-Floris Jespers

1962

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Floris Jespers’s post-war aesthetic excursions were sporadic, unexpected, and diverse. Yet, in these experiments, the old avant- gardist was clearly seeking to learn from the younger generation. Consequently, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jespers experimented both with abstract expressionist drippings and with a cold-abstract play with shapes.

Jespers’s openness to diverse formal experiments was consistent with the rest of his body of work. During the 1910s and 1920s, he evolved from fauvism and futurism to cub ism and a wayward form of surre alism. Later, during the interwar period, he focused on mysterious landscapes of Knokke and the Ardennesas as well as still lives, before arriving — after WWII — at a cubism indebted to Picasso. 

Ultimately, Jespers achieved great success in the 1950s as a painter of the Congo. In a distinctive style, he immortalised the primal pow er of humanity and nature in the Belgian colony. It was precisely with that work that he participated in Expo 58 —  the Belgian modern mo mentum to which Groep 58 sought to provide a counterpoint.

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