Felix De Clercq

In our current digital age it doesn’t seem like an obvious choice to choose painting today. But as a young artist, Felix De Clercq takes the freedom to approach every theme, he composes his surroundings by drawing and painting.
The work hops on two thoughts. On the one hand he fishes in the pool of (art)history: he’s inspired by the folklore art, sees the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani as one of his masters and recognizes himself in the stories of Gerard Reve. On the other hand he responds to our everyday reality, he paints the landscape of his life: he interweaves autobiographical elements with images from the popular visual culture of Netflix. These are not stand-alone images, they exist in a specific context. De Clercq isolates and stills them, to investigate them in a painterly way. He pays a different kind of attention to everyday images and stages things as he sees them, in books or on TV.
De Clercq may start from the tradition of primitive or naive art, but the work itself is all but naive. Unpretentious and straightforward perhaps? Imagination is important, reality but a perception.