Nature moves further into the foreground, while colour assumes a more prominent role. Gielen explores how an seemingly familiar image – a flower, a tree, a landscape – can suddenly become enigmatic through isolation, repetition or an unexpected combination.
Bart Gielen is known for a visual language that lies at the intersection of drawing, painting and sculpture. He works with charcoal and pigment on paper and wood, as well as on ceramic supports of his own making. His work draws on old engravings, historical painting, mythological figures and classical compositions, which he combines with imagery from the media and his personal archive. By removing these fragments from their original context and bringing them together in new ways, he creates enigmatic, contemporary compositions in which recognition and alienation coexist.
In Blooming Illusions, this familiar visual world is opened up in a striking new way through the introduction of colour and nature. Flowers, trees and landscapes mark a shift in Gielen’s visual language, without abandoning the layered complexity and quiet tension that characterise his oeuvre. Whereas earlier works often centred on dark, almost mythical figures and scenes, a greater sense of light seems to enter this new series. The natural forms, however, are not straightforward symbols of beauty or optimism, but building blocks of a universe of his own, in which beauty, mystery and imagination coexist.
From Darkness to Colour
Blooming Illusions builds on themes that have long been present in Gielen’s practice, while shifting the perspective. In his previous solo exhibition at Unframed Gallery, Search for the Giants, he explored the delicate balance between threat and protection, good and evil, reality and myth. This ambiguity remains, but takes on a different form in the new works. Nature moves further into the foreground, while colour assumes a more prominent role. Gielen explores how an seemingly familiar image – a flower, a tree, a landscape – can suddenly become enigmatic through isolation, repetition or an unexpected combination.
Gielen’s fascination with historical painting also remains an important point of departure. Echoes of art history can be recognised in his compositions, treatment of light and visual motifs, which he translates into a distinctly contemporary visual language. His images emerge from an extensive visual archive of art-historical references, illustrations, found imagery and his own material.
The choice of support is equally essential. Gielen not only draws on paper, but increasingly works on wooden panels and ceramic forms that he creates himself. The texture and physical presence of these materials become part of the image. Drawing thus takes on an almost sculptural character: the image does not simply exist on a surface, but enters into a relationship with its form and materiality.
This duality runs like a common thread throughout Blooming Illusions. Colour exists alongside monochrome, stillness alongside tension, and the familiar alongside the mysterious. At first glance, a flower, tree or landscape may seem recognisable, yet it can never be fully defined. Gradually, the image may shift, transforming into a memory, a dreamlike vision or a suggestion.
Gielen is less interested in explaining his images than in the possibility of getting lost in them. He creates a world in which not everything needs to be named or deciphered, and where beauty and mystery are allowed to exist in their own right. The viewer is granted the same freedom: Blooming Illusions invites us to look more closely and allow our own connections, stories and meanings to emerge.
