“….I really really love oil paint as a medium. It allows for such textural movement and the texture can take over the work.”

Interview by Charlie Mills

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I’m an artist from Belgium. I moved to England when I was 21 and lived there for 9-ish years before moving back to Belgium in my 30s. I never studied art. It’s not that I didn’t want to, I was just a very restless person in my 20s and kind of messed up the opportunities I felt I had and the idea of it seemed to slip away. I was brought up in a very artistic household so I had the privilege of having parents who were very immersed in their own creative practice and made me feel like it was something essential I needed to do always, to express myself. It took me a little while to gain enough confidence to believe I could make work that could be exhibited. I think I started thinking of painting that way when I was 26.

A central dynamic in your work is the balance between abstraction and figuration. In earlier paintings, the former style was predominant. Whereas now it feels that figuration is moving further to the fore. How do you feel about these two languages of painting, and is your work conscious of the negotiation between the two?

I love abstract work so much. I remember vividly being quite new to my understanding of it and feeling so moved by Sonia Delaunay, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler in particular. Somewhere in the past few years, I’ve stepped further and further towards using a protagonist in my work. They were present before in a symbolic sense but now often as a physical character. Part of that shift is due to the work that compels me at the moment which is more story-telling, like the animator Suzanne Pitt or the incredible visual diary of Charlotte Salomon. But in painting, there are no rules so I remind myself to not hold back with the limitations that strictly representative images could have. I love putting an almost entirely abstract work in each show, or having a section in the work that becomes focused on texture and colour far more than the total image and leads an otherwise figurative painting away from that distinction. I feel personally that’s a way for me to feel comfortable with work that feels quite illustrative in some places, a way for me to pull it back into the freedom of painting. Maybe. It’s on my mind a lot.

Another part of it is that I felt like a central character could lead the work to a more specific story that I wanted to tell, and somehow that allows me to feel like I need to explain less. I’m finding it hard to put it into words but I found it helpful to use a somewhat specific character to live through a series of allegories.

Second to this, I wonder if you could speak a bit about your painterly process? As an artist that is known well for the physicality of their work, how do you approach the materiality and action of painting?

These days I do a lot of drawing and planning, collaging drawings. Although these images are then usually quite lifeless and limited and I always have to remind myself that the magic, for me, happens with oil paint. Everything comes alive because I really really love oil paint as a medium. It allows for such textural movement and the texture can take over the work. Martin Wong for me is such a good example. They are so incredible in the flesh, regardless of the drawings themselves being amazing too.

When I make the drawing that part feels like quite an emotional process where I have to get very involved with the idea behind the work, and then once it gets to painting everything becomes more of a technical process. I think because I used to work abstractly I would have only the paint to help me express a feeling, you start reading into every mark and I’m quite happy for my work to get read through pure painterly marks.

There is a clear surrealist influence in your recent work, but also a deep emotional realism that is inseparable from the images you represent and the materiality of your pieces — with bodily, thick brushstrokes and beautifully hand-made frames. How do you approach this balance between surreal and the affective, and in which ways do you think that influence from surrealism can accentuate or colour your practice?

The other day I looked up the actual definition of surrealism in Flemish, which is probably influenced by its meaning within surrealist writing, but it is quite a soft idea. It’s not so much literally painting daylight within a night scene or brass on fire or upside-down flying birds, but very much a philosophical one. When you think of it as the idea of creating tension and expressing emotions by allowing the world of painting to create unrealistic situations. If you look up Rachel Baes, for instance, you get a very different surrealist than maybe Dali, if he’s the first image you think of. But then for me, Magritte is still the biggest influence. And his strength for me lies in, firstly his determination for his work to be political and provocative, but secondly visually I feel like sticking to the ability to be at least somewhat anatomically correct and adding realism is a way in which he really enhanced the surrealist tension in his work. So I always feel it’s important to make the work real enough to read as a genuine situation.

René Magritte, Rachel Baes or Jane Graverol might be examples of Belgian surrealists that evoke similar sensations through their painting — yet you also cite Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? as a central influence in recent work (a painted diary in which the German-Jewish artist documents the tragedies of her life and family history during the early 1940s). Could you explain a bit about your recent influences: who are your key heroes and heroines?

Those are all still heavily on my mind. I have revisited Magritte over and over and he’s such an incredible source of power and inspiration. Since I’ve been back in Belgium I’ve been delving into the classic Belgian painters again as well like Ensor, Alechinsky, Tuymans,.. I really think there is such a rich language and I can see other Belgian peers referencing the depth that they created and I find it very exciting.

But I think it was mainly the animations of Suzan Pitt that sent me on a completely different path a few years ago. The domestic sadness in her work is so compelling, recognisable, dark,..

I went to New York and completely fell in love with Jacob Lawrence. I’d seen some of his work before but never so much and never before anything in real life. I think he’s the greatest American painter ever. I know it’s not so much an obvious direct influence for me visually but I love artists like that that make you realise how rich a personal language and perspective can be and how exciting it is to find your own.

Fashion has also played recurring roles in your practice, especially in relation to shifting rural and urban motifs. A clear sense of escapism or longing is manifested through symbols of youth, nightlife and desire. Where did this set of motifs develop from, and do you still approach this symbolism the same way today — as something that represents a drive for self-expression and freedom?

“Youth, nightlife and desire." Are definitely a good sum of subjects I try to draw upon in my work. And the darkness of desire too, escapism, bored-domesticism. But I feel my work feels at the same time quite often demure and still. Maybe overtly dark at times. For my upcoming exhibition in Paris I painted a character, which is based on myself but also other women in my life, lying on the floor in probably what feels like a sort of imagined death. But they’re wearing Margiela’s Tabi Boots and a winter coat. I’d been battling with PTSD and I wanted to dance around the idea of death fantasies but at the same time wanted it to be the moment right before you go out where you have to talk yourself into leaving the house. Halfway through painting it I was shaking my head wondering what compelled me to paint essentially myself like a corpse. But I thought I wouldn’t know where I wanted it to go until I persisted and finished it. But I also think going into darkness within art is a way to set yourself free. I think that’s generally a drive for me to paint. It’s kind of like how it’s a good idea to tell your friend who’s sitting next to you that you’re about to have a panic attack so they can help you, but then saying it out loud is usually what exacerbates it.

I don’t know whether I’m talking about self-expression or escapism. Fashion is a way to do both.. painting is a way to do both.

There’s a few different angles to which I can interpret the recurring ‘escapism’ theme in relation to my personal life, but within exploring that I’ve found it’s quite a universally felt need on a lot of levels for a lot of people. In a broad sense, the need to pretend to be this desirable version of yourself is so popular which explains the popularity of social media: escapism. But internally, for me, escapism is at the same time something I do in the studio as something I do when I dress up cos I have to enter a room full of people. There is a version of myself that is an exhibitionist but also a version that is deeply uncomfortable with being.

In a recent conversation, you noted that previous work typically used paint to explore and express feelings associated with your past. In more recent work, such as your solo exhibition at Tennis Elbow in New York, this shifted to painting about the present and the subsequent relationship between presence and absence in the lived moment. Why do you think this shift of focus took place in your work and is it something you think will continue for a while?

I think speaking to you was one of the first times that that had fully occurred to me. I think I used to use my youth as a time period to put all the feelings I had into a sort of characteristic version of myself. Like the way a lot of great movies carry the theme ‘coming of age’, but they’re obviously written by an adult. This rawness of youth is an easy tool to express a lot of feelings that are still relatable when you’re older. And they were things I was feeling at the time - like I’d been living in big cities, I’d been aspiring to be or seem a certain way, I’d been self-critical, self-deprecating, self-important.. and it’s easy to use coming-of-age as a period of time to reference because that’s a time when those feelings are super raw and they’re kind of happening to everyone at that age. 

But then two years ago when I moved back to Belgium and my whole life sort of shifted drastically. I became a carer for my mum when we were in the middle of the pandemic, I had to move back into my childhood home which had always been a super triggering environment in the past.. and I tried to start painting for this series I’d had in my mind for a while. But I just couldn’t.

I suddenly felt like using the past became something that I was hiding behind. So I started making quite small work that really felt almost like daily diary entries of situations I had had no time to reflect on. The paintings would take a day to make and I could paint so many that honesty got in the way of self-editing or self-preservation. And now it seems sort of impossible to pull the veil of storytelling fully over it again cause ultimately what I want as an artist is to be fully open. Not per se for the viewer but for myself.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I’ve just opened my second solo in Paris. It will be open during Paris Fashion Week and the closing weekend will be during FIAC.

Alongside this, I’m working on a collaboration with French fashion house Maison Cléo on a series of patterns that will be printed on recycled mesh fabrics for their latest runway set to debut at Paris Fashion Week on September 27th. I’m so excited about this as it might be obvious but my second biggest love is Fashion.

I applied to get into the fashion program in Ghent when I was 18, but walked out cause I was terrified! I knew I wanted to do something with Fashion but I felt I didn’t fit into the course. I’m happy I didn’t go through with it cause I need to be a painter but now I watch runway shows to soothe anxiety after a long day in the studio and I can’t deny it’s my second love. I paint and make a lot of my own clothes and it’s been a childhood dream to do something like this for a brand.. It’s literally a little girl’s dream come true. 

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All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 03/11/22