Galleries in Paris

The set of works by Bart Baele’s shown at the Galerie Polaris from January 8t 2011 goes by the emblematic title:The crackled Flemish.

Born in 1969, the artist lives and works near Ghent.

Bart Baele’s work can be considered as a fragmented narration: each drawing, each painting, each sculpture records a moment of his life, like a confession revealing the artist’s bruised psyche. But it also harbours — and it is probably the reason for its highly contemporary obviousness — a mysterious component, a kind of idealism that combines suffering and redemption, which generates ever new questioning on the viewer’s side.

Practised almost obsessionally, Bart Baele uses drawing sometimes inspiring the subjects of his paintings. More direct and spontaneous than the painted work, his extremely varied drawings demonstrate a mix of frailty and affliction. The artist often represents himself, sometimes as a skeleton: referring to Ensor’s caustic masquerade of life and death.

Painting offers Bart Baele a wider emotional field. Reworked month after month, or even year after year, the paintings go over the same symbolic, religious and/or organic representations, which he dramatizes with soberness and violence. Bart Baele summons his inner torments as well as those of the rest of the world and transcribes them, as would the most responsive seismograph.