Vincent Geyskens

What the artist puts on canvas ranges from portraits and still lifes to abstract colour compositions with bold strokes of paint. Sometimes, he applies the paint very thickly in order to draw attention to the structure of the paint and to the physical act of painting. Vincent Geyskens compares a canvas with a skin: it is something that is alive, that has texture, that can be worked on just as a skin can be worked on with make-up. He uses colour and paint to build up abstract works. He uses light and dark to create a sense of emptiness and openness.

Painted series of frames, using advertising boards as the surface, form the backbone of the exhibition. Through the succession of frames, Geyskens creates a certain rhythm. The artist applies large areas of colour alternated with empty segments that provide a view of the wall behind. For his collages, Geyskens starting point is existing images that have a clear function as advertisements and campaign images. The erotic or political images that he tears out aim to convince, to excite. By brutally cutting up and folding the image, he makes it his own and creates a distance to the original image. They become new compositions that change our first impression of those images and pictures. 
 

The exhibition also includes a selection from Vincent Geyskens' numerous drawing books full of quick sketches of nature made during his many walks. These landscape drawings show how he tries to visualise his observations with just a few pencil strokes. In M, a connection is made between the works of Geyskens and a number of works by Alfred Delaunois (1877-1941) from the collection of M. Delaunois was a painter who also placed texture and matter at the centre of his rough drawings.
 

The most recent works in the exhibition are Geyskens’ paintings from 2020: subdued still lifes on a white background. What is depicted is recognisable, but flirts with the abstract. As in his other works, here too the painting technique used gives the work something close to tangibility. 
 

Curator: Eva Wittocx

At Geyskens' solo exhibition, M and Mercatorfonds published a monograph with an overview of his work, with many images and texts by Dominic Van den Boogerd and Eva Wittocx, among others. 
 

A new poem by him entitled 'Het Geslacht van de Paling', will be published by het balanseer.