Hans Theys is a twentieth-century philosopher and art historian. He has written and designed dozens of books on the works of contemporary artists and published hundreds of essays, interviews and reviews in books, catalogues and magazines. All his publications are based on actual collaborations and conversations with artists.

This platform was developed by Evi Bert (M HKA / Centrum Kunstarchieven Vlaanderen) in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (Research group Archivolt), M HKA, Antwerp and Koen Van der Auwera. We also thank Idris Sevenans (HOR) and Marc Ruyters (Hart Magazine).

ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS

Robert Devriendt - 2015 - Concealed Stories [EN, interview]
Interview , 4 p.




__________

Hans Theys


Concealed Stories
In conversation with Robert Devriendt



For the third year running, the Groeningemuseum in Bruges is inviting a contemporary artist to converse with its collection. In two galleries the awkward wooden panels attached to the walls were painted white at the artist’s request. During our joint visit to the exhibition, Robert Devriendt (°1955) twice begins talking about these white walls. He tells me that the interior of his house is a neutral colour and that he cannot bear art on the walls. What would that be, a neutral colour? You understand that not even ordinary painted walls escape his notice. Devriendt is someone who likes to look and he can quite easily lose himself in that gaze, both in the almost endless pleasure he derives from the material and the texture, and in the feelings, thoughts, images and stories they can conjure up.
After the conversation which follows below, we go and look at several paintings by old masters.
“When I look at an artwork I always look for the part the artist derived most pleasure from painting,” says Devriendt. “Sometimes that is an aspect of the figure, but equally it might be the background. In this painting, for example, the background is really beautiful.”


Drama

Devriendt grew up on an isolated farm. There was no television. The only fabricated images he got to see as a boy were the paintings in the church and pictures that came with chocolate bars. At the age of thirteen, in the blessed year 1968, he enrolled for an American painting course for beginners, which went by the name of ‘Famous Artists Course’. The written assignments contained illustrations by painters like Picasso and Willem De Kooning.
Devriendt’s first solo show dates from 1983. He was already producing the small paintings we are now so familiar with. Seven years ago he started grouping these little works into small series.
“I have always painted things in my surroundings, giving them a role in an imagined drama that would unfold around me,” the artist told the undersigned. “That role invests them with a quality that goes beyond reality. My work always seems to start from a collision between the direct action and appeal of things in nature and the indirect and retarding effect of culture. I think we create illusions to enable us to deal with reality. This creating of illusions continues unabated because they are constantly unmasked, exposed… I suggest a drama, but it is up to the viewer to shape that drama and to interpret the collision of images… Personally, what I really want to do is listen to the things and allow them to come to the fore. The painting technique I use depends on the material reality of the thing depicted and the way it illuminates. My paintings are quite smooth because I don’t want the facture to interfere with the image.”


Forbidden images

We drink coffee in an establishment near the Groeningemuseum. Through the window we can see the high walls of a school Devriendt attended as a child. “It was terrible,” he tells me. “I had a little room made of pitch pine. It measured 1.6 by 2 metres. I can still picture that pitch pine: extremely solid, reddish in colour, made to last for ever…
The school was very oppressive, every day we had to attend mass and four times a day we had self-study periods. It was a very strict system. As an escape, I looked at Hélène Fourment. I had a pile of small reproductions of paintings, discovered in chocolate bars, or which I had swapped for Soubry points (a packet of six or seven prints for forty points). Rubens, Rembrandt, El Greco, Ruysdael…
Pictures were banned. Once I hung up a print in my room and by the evening someone had removed it. On the inside of the lift-up lid of my desk, I had stuck a reproduction of a winter landscape. I think it was by Isidore Opsomer. Every morning I looked at it so as to be closer to my parents’ farm. It kept me going for another day. In fact, images still serve the same purpose for me today. You can select them and place them in a sequence to create an alternative world and to escape reality…
The first time I visited the Groeningemuseum, at the age of nine, I thought I was in an extension of that terrible school. The pious hands of Canon van der Paele! Aghast, I wandered from gallery to gallery until I started looking at details. They opened up a whole new world for me.”

- Do you remember any particular detail?

Devriendt: An eye in the seventeenth-century portrait of Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain painted by Frans Pourbus the Younger. I noticed that her left eye shone like a jewel.

- That lady is wearing a lot of pearls. Did it strike you then that the gleam of her eye is achieved in the same way as the sheen of the pearls?

Devriendt: I don’t think so. I saw the eye as a precious stone. It was a liberating experience. In daily life you can never look at someone’s eyes for very long. If you try to, they send you away….
If you fix something with your eyes for a long time, your gaze narrows. The lines of your gaze cross. Then the world opens and you find yourself in a sort of endless space where everything has to do with everything else. The eye becomes a pearl, the pearl dissolves in the air. You can spend a short while in a world like that, but there comes a point when you have to return to the real world.


Eight thousand touches

- You make small paintings which you group in series, with the result that they resemble film stills, fragments of a larger narrative which forms in the viewer’s head. That’s why your work is sometimes likened to film. I would like to approach them as paintings, however. How do you construct them?

Devriendt: I prefer not to go into detail. Each painting consists of some eight thousand touches of paint. You have to use a different logical construction depending on the sort of paint and the colours you are using. It is very complicated. It is difficult to reconstruct. And anyway, that’s an awful question to ask.

- Why?

Devriendt: Dealing with paint is the same as dealing with people. You can be very direct or you can feel your way, you can be obsessive or superficial. The way a painter deals with paint says a lot about the way he or she deals with people. If you look at this canvas, for example, The Death of Belisarius’ Wife painted by the Bruges artist Franciscus Josephus Kinsoen in the early nineteenth century, you can see what that man saw and felt. Look at the transition of light and shadow on her skin. The paint is perfectly organized. You can only paint something like that if you have really felt it. He probably only wanted to paint the woman. The rest was par for the course.

- Looking at your paintings, I see that you use different images as a starting point: photographs you have taken yourself, frozen video images or low resolution images (some with coarse pixels or oil stain effect) which you find on the internet. I imagine you do this because each kind of image requires a different technical approach.

Devriendt: That’s right. I love those sort of challenges.


Hellfires

- Some images also give you the chance to use colours which you don’t find in traditional paintings.

Devriendt: Of course, if you try and paint an electric power cord or a computer screen, you can’t look at old masters to see how they did that. You have to find your own solutions. But for an exploding car you can of course consult Bosch’s hellfires.

- One painting features a car parked immediately behind a concrete post. Did you take that photograph? I think that’s unlikely because it is such an unusual car, but at the same time I find it hard to imagine that someone would put a photograph like that of his car on the internet.

Devriendt: I took the photograph of the car myself. It was parked in front of a café. I added the post.

- If we look at your work as images, rather than as paintings, it strikes me that there are many things you don’t show. You seem to suggest stories, but you could also call it a form of concealment.

Devriendt: Yes, what you don’t show is also important. You process emotions while you’re painting. You have to discharge all the impressions you have absorbed. But not in a literal way, of course.

- When I met you for the first time in 1997, you painted stuffed animals. Today we see another painting of a stuffed animal. I find it surprising that you manage to make it clear that it is stuffed. But quite apart from that, the subject seems to suggest a kind of fascination with images which lie, images which promise a fullness that is beyond our reach.

Devriendt: That may well be. And digital images heighten that impression. They are transparent. You feel you could put your arm through them.

- The images lie, but the paintings are real.

Devriendt: Maybe. Certainly they have been meddled with. That is already something.


Montagne de Miel, October 27th 2015


Translated by Alison Mouthaan