Through fifteen fascinating and tortured paintings, he delivers to us the universe populated by his demons. The strength of his work lies both in his palette in the symbolism of recurring motifs.  His pain, mixed with a bitter humor, is omnipresent, universal, and impregnates each of his paintings with a sincerity and a disconcerting spontaneity.

Bart Baele’s imagery is composed of heterogeneous and often recurring elements: crucifixes, reminiscent of the catechism of his childhood, skulls, testicles that fly into the air under the title of Victory of French or Flamish words, thrown on the canvas. Invoking his personal pantheon – Antonin Artaud, Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh, James Ensor, Niko Pirosmani… Bart Baele quotes and uses them as a kind of incantation made out loud, accentuating the tension between satire and drama, pamphlet and fable, which runs throughout this fascinating work.  These quotations amplify an emotional charge from which the spectator cannot escape. The theatricality of existence takes here all its extent.

The Dutch painter Constant seems to have grasped Bart Baele’s approach by anticipation when he wrote: « a painting is not an assembly of lines and colors; it is an animal, a night, a cry, a human being, and all of that at the same time. »

The artist’s voice is like this cry, signifying that the artist exists and breathes, a silent but also ironic cry of anxiety.

The characters that populate his works are sometimes disembodied envelopes, already mowed down by death, sometimes puppets from Baele’s personal theater.

Ghosts, masks, skeletons, lost children: so many frail, often floating silhouettes. Referring to his life, but especially to his daily reflections on the place of man in humankind, Bart Baele draws a pessimistic portrait, but filled with the humor of Belgian artists.

If Bart Baele manages to take the necessary distance to this affliction that represents for him the contemporary life and the art of today, he does not translate less in his work, the strong feelings on this human nature.

Each painting is for him a scar of life.

The Last Crow  is the third solo exhibition of the artist at the galerie Polaris, following Le Flamand craquelé in January 2011 and Religion-lépreux-crapulé in 2012.
 According to the weather, Bart Baele works either in the kitchen or in the barn of his isolated East Flanders farm (Oost-Vlaanderen). The Last Crow emerged during this winter, whiteness and  loneliness are the basis of this new series. One might think that the crow represents the personality of the artist like the mask for his fellow countryman James Ensor. Bart Baele’s recent works describe his torments and his vision of humanity  where man tries to differentiate good and evil, pain and joy. It appears with much emotion and violence but also, if one watches thoroughly the details of the paintings, with humour.

These strange and singular ( but remarkable ) paintings and drawings do not show the difficulty of living but rather the strength that every one must find to accept it. Bart Baele’s emotion is primitive and crude as we seldom see.

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.