Hervé Martijn
Painter, ° 1961
https://www.hervemartijn.com/Lives and works in Avelgem (BE)
Martijn’s paintings are not just canvases with layers of paint, but as their titles reveal, they are the artist’s expression of reflection and reverie, they are in fact pure poetry. The figures are torn from reality and staged. They seem inaccessible and yet so close. They involuntarily turn their backs on us. These paintings exude a haze of mystery. They are intimate scenes that unleash a wave of melancholy. The suppressed, sometimes painful, gnawing memories and perceptions that come from the canvas, as from the psychologist’s chaise longue, are the words of a hurt poet. Through his own inner search for an immanent truth, the artist teaches us a valuable lesson: we, as individuals, are allowed to feel our own pain, show our wounds, because in displaying those psychic torments lies a beauty that hides the outward and gratuitous splendor and transcends the everyday life. (text by Wouter Verbeke Sep 2016)