Sergio De Beukelaer | -...

Sergio De Beukelaer | -...

Cultural Centre Mechelen

01.12.2020 - 21.03.202

The Belgian artist Sergio De Beukelaer (°1971, Antwerp) has been working on a self-confident and uncompromising oeuvre of paintings for over twenty years. The work of Sergio De Beukelaer appears simple and colourful but unites all kinds of apparent contradictions. Although his painting looks sleek, formal, geometric and abstract, it always starts out from a strong desire for reality. It is not the reality itself that interests him. He is concerned with a translation thereof. Sergio De Beukelaer does not seek to imitate or emulate in that regard. Through visual thinking and acting, he always achieves a certain form of abstraction within the formal framework of painting.

Seemingly effortlessly, his art navigates between surface and space, text and image, intellectual seriousness and playful irony, painting and sculpture. Via the original and inimitable concept of the fat canvas, a three-dimensional painting, the artist breaks down the boundaries of classical painting. His paintings appropriate the space and generate a powerful visual impact on their environment.

In the exhibition in Mechelen, Sergio De Beukelaer achieves a radical, complete synthesis of his ideas of colour and form, objectivity and subjectivity. The smart, well-thought-out exhibition of recent work crystallises his geometric painter’s idiom into an insightful total installation. The result is an unparalleled artistic statement that he links in terms of both form and content to everyday media culture, including social media culture.

The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial artist’s publication, (catalogue) the form and content of which honours the artistic practice of Sergio De Beukelaer and underlines and conveys the importance of his unique oeuvre. As an artistic annex to the exhibition, the artist also designed the related context for the presentation which is totally in line with his work.