Bruno Vekemans

Born in 1952, Bruno Vekemans is a Belgian painter born in Antwerp.

Considered a postmodernist painter, Vekemans went through many periods before his art changed dramatically in the 1990s and reached maturity.

Self-taught, Bruno Vekemans cultivated his gift for drawing through contact with the works of the great Flemish masters kept at the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he spent hours contemplating the collection of works by Rubens as well as the early works of James Ensor.

Painting is for him a plastic adventure linked to the pleasure of painting. “What matters to me in painting is the image and not the message. I am not a committed artist. Reality is stronger than imagination. The “story” lies in the invoice, the way in which the paint is applied to the support, and not in the representation which in my opinion is incidental. »Writes Bruno Vekemans.

The artist does not work with models. He seeks his inspiration in books, magazines and photography.

By working from the image, Bruno Vekemans creates a new “reality” which takes shape through a very talented colourist work. Vibrant and of great intensity, the colors he uses play between transparency, fluidity and opacity in tones often tinged with browns, blues and blacks.

Simplifying the image to the extreme through the use of chiaroscuro, Vekemans' works, whether portraits or cityscapes, have often been compared to the works of Spilliaert and the atmosphere of solitude and solitude. mystery that they emanate from that of Edward Hopper's paintings.

Vekemans' work comes in a variety of techniques, ranging from oil painting to collages, drawing on paper or painting on eglomised glass.

Two trips by the artist, one to Kinshasa in Congo in 2008 and the other to Cuba in 2010, were revealing of the artist's talent. He makes portraits and landscapes from pictures that he takes himself.

In these works, a particular dimension and an even stronger emotion emerge from his works. Perhaps quite simply because they are inhabited by a more personal gaze where the artist invites us to share his sensitivity to the world around him.

The trip to Cuba was the occasion of a very beautiful retrospective of the artist at the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana giving rise to a complete catalog of his works.

Exhibitions: Antwerp, Sydney, Paris, New York, Strasbourg St'Art, Gent Lineart, Sydney, Saint Louis, Tokio ...