Jan De Vliegher. collections, Elias, Willem, Hardcover
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Jan De Vliegher. collections, Elias, Willem, Hardcover
Jan de vliegher
Text by Willem Elias, Jan De Vliegher's Figurative Abstraction, Pretexts for Painters' Passion <br />Roberto Polo Gallery proudly presents Collections, the first solo exhibition in Brussels of Jan De Vliegher, a painter born in 1964 in Bruges, where he resides and works. The exhibition consists of four series totaling 44 recent oil paintings on canvas. De Vliegher, who was trained at the Hoger Instituut voor Beeldende Kunsten Sint-Lucas in Ghent, has exhibited in several important European cities and in New York, where he will do so again this year. <br />De Vliegher is a vitalist painter, a rare talent in today's world of contemporary art. His painting is a Postmodernist reconciliation between figurative representation and Action Painting, something deemed impossible by the Modernists. De Vliegher paints alla prima from the shoulder - a liberating technique - not from the wrist as traditionally. We may baptize his maniera as Figurative Action Painting within an abstract framework of single subject or 'all-over' compositions. For these reasons, we may see De Vliegher's paintings upside down or obliquely. They give us the impression of having been mounted onto a flywheel and turned like a 'spin painting' by Damien Hirst. <br />De Vliegher's palimpsestic subject matter - ancient statues, noble interiors, precious glass, porcelain and faience - are symbols of faded glory and power, which he questions. True to his time, whereas painters usually composed with charcoal on paper, he does so digitally from a database of over 40 000 of his images that he keeps in 441 numeric files and sub-files. However, we must not lose sight of the forest for the trees: De Vliegher's painting is above all formalist. In keeping with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, De Vliegher's painting transcends what we see and encourages our active participation. It is about painting itself, not about mimesis, the imitative representation of the real world. According to Jacques Lacan, here lies 'a trap for the gaze': Jan De Vliegher seduces us with his subject matter as well as with his technical bravura, while brilliantly avoiding the often facile pitfalls of Hyperrealism and, instead, presents us with a vitalized reality.
