2021 New Images / Altered Paintings

“…be self-taught and reinvent your life
because you must;”

– Charles Bukowski

De-construction

The use of a de-constructive process makes the technique almost like sculpting. Things are absorbed, taken off, and over-painted, to create something new. It’s important to see that the work has been created, has been manipulated (handled), and lives its own life.

When it’s been over-worked so many times, the painting says it all, that the paintbrush walks on the narrow equilibrium between beauty (creation) and ill-treatment (destruction) and knows it is there – in a kind of no-space where the true human really lives – and this ‘human’ is the main object of my investigation in art.

Although that transformation could only happen by the intermediation of Bart D., the painter cannot be held entirely responsible for the result. That sort of circularity one can also find in the alienating effect of the home-coming in a country which is not the one of one’s birth. Bart D. had understood that nothing just is, despite the overwhelming sense of reality human beings appear to be obsessed with. Expatriation might have triggered that understanding, but then again, it might not. The best way out of that deadlock is to let the canvases speak for themselves.

–Amante Fennes, Ghent, 2009 

A slowness of sentiment emanates from the depicted appearances, almost all of which find their origins in human beings but, through that accurately felt slowness by the painter, have transformed themselves to become what they appear to be.