SOFACQ Gallery

Luc Dondeyne has spent the last decade devoting himself to a slow but grim search for the development of a highly personal pictorial style, which you could best describe as 'Impressionist'.

 

His hand-held, but also nonchalantly brushed paint strokes in fairly bright and often not obvious colors, act as puzzle pieces for the overall image, which only fully reveals itself after taking the necessary viewing distance.

 

However, in contrast to the 19th-century French Impressionists, whose fleeting and surefire keys were completely in function of the rather sweet, but on the other hand almost meta-painterly representation of the constantly changing light, Dondeyne uses his 'leg' for the benefit of the (unfinished) aspect of the image. In itself this is of course not new.

 

A painter like Michaël Borremans, for example, often paints his images with a surrealistic mystery, whereby the viewer is triggered to complete the 'story' that takes place within the canvas - however absurdly - in his own way. With Luc Dondeyne, however, there is more going on. The explicitly mysterious and dark-melancholic atmosphere that - partly due to his strange use of an impressionistic-looking pictoriality - radiates many of his paintings, ensures that the viewer is effective in the unfinished story.

 

What's more: sometimes this belief is so strong that you actually forget the canvas itself, completely immersing yourself in that recurring, uncomfortable melancholy. In this respect, Luc Dondeyne's work is not only about the purely pictorial aspect of figurative painting, but at least as much about (still!) universal human feelings.