Laurent Dierick

Born in Etterbeek (Brussels - Belgium) in 1978, even though he has no clear predisposition for painting and drags his feet during school visits to museums while being castigated by aging guides from the Venice of the North a little too extremist for his taste, Laurent Dierick follows his capricious self-taught instinct. At 16, he turns strangely to oil painting, after having been attracted by the carnal aspect of any canvas hanging on an ordinary wall. After a long and lonely apprenticeship in his tiny teenage room bathed in doubtful volatile scents and creating ersatz of the same ilk, he decided in 2003 to exchange oil for acrylic and continued his quest for materials. This technique allows him to explore new avenues: collages, sand, plaster, glues, resins, varnishes, ... which he superimposes in successive layers to deliver symbolic works between abstraction and figuration. His paintings, alongside the excessive decrepitude of the materials, open up a theme that imposes itself effortlessly in his eyes in an almost psychoanalytic way: the catastrophe of Pripyat of April 1986 (Chernobyl). Dressed in a mask and working in the underground passages of the building that serves as his roof, he easily recreates a world close to an anti-nuclear sarcophagus. His influences are multiple and visible and stand out in American, Spanish and German names: Rauschenberg, Tapies and especially Kiefer. Writing is already omnipresent in his works in the form of clearly visible sentences (sometimes tagged, sometimes scratched off but always readable) like distant warnings; the meaning of these lapidary sentences, between popular adages and derisory graffiti, is as much in the deep reflection as in the quirky humor, as much in the dialogue between text and color as in that between plan and relief (Claude Stas). After 8 years of work with monochromatic accents, the child of Chernobyl lets his masks fall for a while. He then invites the dust to cover his studio a little, and puts his bags of influences in another building, which he will try to exploit no longer in its basements, but in the upper floors, in the light of day. But this light is too blinding and he decides, after careful consideration and inspection of the lower floors, to invest this place he knows so well: the basement. The latter, like any new environment, influences every bit of creation in the creator's head, the work is redirected automatically, like a waking dream.