PIETER PAUWEL GALLERY 2016

David De Graef’s visionary creations.

This painter, who prefers disturbance to order, invites you to plunge into the depths of an obsessive world where no moral value is absolute. His sharp insight on our institutions and emotions traps you in a universe where reflection and fear coexist.

David De Graef’s world is definitely strange. It’s a visionary universe, which he handles with both tenderness and violence. This self-taught artist joins power with finesse to reflect upon our joys and discomfort. He plays with contrasts to expose scenes of loss and resurrection. The phantasms of this artist portray mankind’s walk through love and hatred, faith and lies, hope and disillusion.

His inspiration springs from physical and mental decay, but is always put in perspective by a strong sense of humour and optimism.

Through his works, David De Graef has developed a pictorial philosophy that escapes rational explanation or narrow classification.

Charles Hieronimus

Curator : art pieter pauwel/Marleen De Schryver

Graduated in Fine Arts from the Institut Saint-Luc of Brussels, Charles Hieronimus defines himself as a “photographist“ because of his use of photohraphy as a base for a large part of his graphic designs.

Charles Hieronimus is known as detailed artisan that manufactured infographic images, carefully prepared and thought as paintings proceeded by a draft. This mental work allows the artist to send out a message, a personal thought about all the big challenges of our time.

‘ Unconscious interventions of a human being into a natural balance, in the purpose of satisfying all his own needs and caprices are the starting point of my works.‘

Another side of his artwork is strictly photographic, namely photographs made in studio without any digital retouching. Everything happened during the shooting.

This choice allows him to capture a glimpse nearly imperceptible to the naked eye, so quick than the brain is incapable to notice it.

“It is possible to make pictures from ordinary things, small details of daily life. Materials which everybody uses everyday: water, oil, painting, petroleum or dirt, metal, grass… From mixing all these liquid or solid materials, which attract or repel each other, will gush unions or explosions captured by the camera to reveal its forceful lines.“

MICHEL BARTHELEMY

Curator : art pieter pauwel/Marleen De Schryver

Michel Barthélemy is born in 1943 in a small town located in Belgian Lorraine. He teached plastic arts during thirty-five years in Arlon, in the south of Belgium.

His first paintings were already a part of the fantastic realism movement, an inner need from what some abstract and expressionist experiments have failed to distract him.

His artworks are realistic in a way that it is based on an evocation of objective reality. Every single staged element might be easily identified. However, as we travel, we will not be able to meet these places, in the streets, nor some of these characters. Nonetheless all of this really exists, not in the world of our ordinary perceptions, but in this inwardness where the feeling takes advantage of the the perceived. We are in a fantastic universe, both familiar and strange. This trend is wearing in his work two complementary aspects which appear one by landscape, the other by portrait.

By Landscape, it demonstrates his delight about the constant power of creation of nature. It feels mostly attracted to places which are open to immensity, which «remind to man his verticality ».

Portraits are sarcastic when they are staging proud characters and they become suddenly tender in front of human being who shares a common passion for their artwork.

Texte : Michel Barthélemy