Nico DE GUCHTENAERE

1963

Nico De Guchtenaere studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. Over the years, his paintings show a number of formal elements that have systematically become more and more self-contained. In addition to thinking in paint, the starting point is always a motif from nature, embedded in a painterly landscape. Successively cells, walnuts, elfin benches and eating patterns by insects were analyzed.

Systematically, the artist dissects these form elements until they degenerate into emotional signs, loaded with grids and organic structures. The linear networks show the direct movement of growing formations.

Using the life cycle of organisms, Nico De Guchtenaere refers to the development of a painting. In the paintings, we look at images of an organic growing, or the process of painting; of the various techniques, from heavily applied impasto to delicately washed away batches.

The forms come from a specific place, but they function neither as illustrations nor as narratives in which the evocation of ambivalent meanings prevails. With his images, the painter does the opposite of what is called “telling.

Nico De Guchtenaere stores those things that people usually pass by. Thus he takes stock, as it were, of the traces left by the larvae of the spider beetle. The script of this linear writing is used for preservation. This ‘preserving’ and registering becomes within the growth process a course, a continuation. The disappearance becomes an appearance again.

Nico De Guchtenaere uses organic forms as metaphors for his own artistic evolution, as a meditation on the naturalness of making art, on man’s physical and mental activity.