Pages intérieures
|
Peter Van Gheluwe
Gnomon
ISBN: 9791092599114
(HB - E)
€
Peter Van Gheluwe I Gnomon is composed of forty-eight oil paintings on canvas and seven charcoal, ink and chalk drawings on paper, all created from 2012 to 2015. The exhibition is accompanied by a 96-page illustrated hardback catalogue featuring a text by Chris Fite-Wassilak, American writer, critic and curator based in London. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, Art Papers, Art Review, Frieze and the Royal Academy of Arts Magazine.
Peter Van Gheluwe, born in 1957, is a Belgian painter living and working near Ghent. He graduated from the Higher Institute of Fine Arts Saint Lucas in the city, where he is a professor at Luca I School of Arts. Since 1978, he has exhibited in Belgium and abroad alongside artists, such as Dirk Braeckman, Wim Delvoye, Anne-Marie Kerckhove and Marc Maet. Van Gheluwe's work is represented in important private and public collections, including those of MuZee in Ostend, the National Bank of Belgium in Brussels and the Flemish Community of Belgium in Brussels as well. 'Gnomon' is defined as the projecting piece on a sundial that shows the time by the position of its shadow. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, like in Peter Van Gheluwe's work, lights and shadows are all that we know, an indistinct vision of reality.
However, rather than an impediment, we might treat this as an advantage. Not only the shadow cast by the gnomon, but also its surrounding light, direct us beyond objects, towards a knowledge of how things really are.
Van Gheluwe's recent paintings and drawings portray in subjectless chiaroscuro the essence and rythms of light and internal time, fleeting and easily forgotten phenomena. His titles are cryptic, a shorthand for recording the coordinates of where and when light was seen. Van Gheluwe's sensitive brushstrokes suggest that - like with many of his contemporaries - a photographic image was at the source of his painting, which hovers between figuration and abstraction.
|
