JAN VAN IMSCHOOT

“Forgotten Abstraction”

January 19 – February 18, 2006

Jan Van Imschoot (Ghent,1963) is a painter situated in Ghent, working in the mode of 1990’s new approaches to painting.

The main focus of his work is to show how a religious subject that has been traditionally depicted, is finally being taken over by cinematographic representations.

Imschoot deals with subjects from the Gospels and from the Apochrypha and he is interested in Christian iconography, especially the history between Christianity and the art of painting.

He believes that the complex development in the Roman Church that has shaped the political and social landscape, has also influenced painting which developed in the same complex way.

The artist chooses to depict dramatic and strongly narrative subject matters which lend the works a dubiously estranging, and at times morbid atmosphere. He takes the religious topics in art as part of a great drama, and makes use of the symbols of Christian doctrines just like a representative of horror-literature.

Every image in his work has a symbolic role, represents an idea and functions as a meeting point for different interpretations, discussions and reflections. Through the artist’s device called “”Hypostasis”, he personifies an abstract concept and visualizes abstraction into figure.

Through his work Imschoot tackles the files of European art history, and encourages discussions for subjects such as the fate and place of painting, offering a genuine contemporary deconstructivist thought.

Believing that the main characteristics of painting are alive in cinema, photography and video-art, he uses images from these areas, trying in this way to find a new identity for painting. His work betrays a fluent, almost virtuose handling of the brush and his colours are perfectly balanced.

Titles are also very important in his work. They become scars in the memory and the perception of the spectator but they are also part of a game. According to the artist:” Language is only intelligible when its codes are known…But there is also the language of art, a language which is not so easy to recognize; in fact it remains hidden as long as possible in an hermetically sealed conceptual space. Figurative painting exists in the middle between these two extremes.”

Imschoot wants to see whether the viewers will digest or eventually analyze, rethink and create a new perspective over his works.

According to Arthur Shopenhauer ” A man at times arrives at a truth or an idea after spending much time in thinking it out for himself, linking together his various thoughts, when he might have found the same thing in a book; it is a hundred times more valuable if he has acquired it by thinking it out for himself. For it is only by his thinking it out for himself that it enters as an integral part, as a living member into the whole system of his thought, and stands in complete and firm relation with it.”

The gallery remains open Tue- Fri, 10:30 – 20:00 and on Saturday, 12:00 – 16:00.