Jef Verheyen

Colours preside over Jef Verheyen’s paintings. Colours represent the artist’s interpretation of the world and the ways in which we perceive nature and eternality. He believed our perception of the natural world has nothing to do with the factual depiction of the natural landscape. He employed colour and light to transcend beyond a mere physical human experience. As the colours enwrap us, we lose a sense of spatiality and everything surrounding us becomes transparent. His work makes us experience light and dark, depth and surface, two-dimensionality and non-dimensionality. For Verheyen looking was not the same as seeing. According to him, seeing was “feeling with the eyes”.

Throughout his entire oeuvre, Verheyen explored and experimented with every aspect of the visible and invisible world by a simple act of painting. He never gave up on the traditional mediums such as canvas, paint, and brush to search for the essence of the world. His goal to explore the theme of light through colours led him to create a painting without beginning or end. The visual language is deeply linked with how to use materials to achieve a state of trance. His ability to handle the materiality of paint in his own way allows us to have a mystical and spiritual experience when we confront the work.

Verheyen adopted the masterly technique of Flemish and Dutch masters—especially Jan van Eyck and Johannes Vermeer—to perfect his picture plane. He successfully dematerialises paintings with an extremely smooth surface and intense, matte colours. Once he prepared the canvas with glaze, he took up a wide bristle brush to apply paint on the smoothened surface. The surface of the canvas becomes so even that one cannot trace the borders between the colour spectrums. There’s no hint of the brushstrokes or layers of gloss that characterise traditional oil painting. In later years, he combined geometric structure and diagonal lines to reveal universal interrelationships between human beings and the world around us.