Eleanor MacFarlane: Philippe Vandenburg

I first came across this artist when I reviewed an exhibition at Hauser and Wirth:

http://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2013/01/31/exhibition-review-philippe-vandenberg-hauser-wirth/

Figuring out the detail in Philippe Vandenberg’s paintings is like looking through the secret diaries of a lost soul. Despairing and torturous, figures enact acts of bestiality, execution and the deepest darkest fears of the mind. However, these are not just shocking or confessional, but deeply strange psychological explorations of the depths of the dark side we all share.

Although the figures are sketchy and immediate, certain images are repeated throughout different paintings, matching in detail and so betraying the deliberate control in their making. He often repeats a painting a few times, like a recurring dream or nightmare, that while it may differ, always ends the same way in a dark murderous place. Obsessional marks and repeated taping on top of paintings remind of the ritualistic acts of a serial killer.

It’s hard to describe that although Vandenberg’s paintings show protracted horror, they keep the eye entranced. The other elements, the backgrounds, the colour, the abstract depths and visual intelligence, draw and attract. The naked bloody figures, dogs, and creatures enact the worst of all possibilities not to shock but to reveal. Drawn from myths and folk archetypes, we recognise a personal hell spawned from a shared culture.

Phillipe Vandenberg died in his native Belgium in 2009, aged 57. His work seems to sum up the anxiety of post war Europe and how that manifests in personal psychosis and panic. This is the UK’s first solo exhibition of Vandenberg’s highly intelligent and important paintings, these ones from the 1990’s.

I found the work very powerful and moving, and I find myself thinking about it often as I have worked on the Found Paintings. Philippe Vandenberg managed to produce that rare combination of randomness and control - his works often deliberately looked like the mad scribblings of a tortured soul, or some deeply unconscious outsider art. He had a great connection with and flow from his inner self that tapped into wordless myths, or inherited nightmares. Suggestions of a bear-like figure or shadow in the woods.

And yet what deliberateness. It comes as a shock to see a series of works with exactly the same scribble reproduced - how difficult that is to do. Which is the initial one, do they all have the same intensity or emotional authenticity, or does this thought or pain last for much longer than a moment, long enough to reiterate?

Messages, almost hidden from the artist himself.

I often read the Found Paintings as if they were painted by an artist, perhaps myself, perhaps done then forgotten about. I feel I am discovering and rediscovering them, filling in all the gestures and scribbles with unconscious meaning and messages.

About Philippe Vandenberg:
http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/58/estate-philippe-vandenberg/biography/