Johan Van Oeckel

Lives and works in Leuven (BE)

With his purified work, Johan Van Oeckel manages to find a meditative frequency that brings an oasis of cerebral calm to our overstimulated existence. By combining and balancing planes, shapes, lines, colours and textures, he repeatedly achieves an aesthetically attractive and harmonious image.

An important protagonist in Johan Van Oeckel’s work is colour. Colour as a signifier, colour as a carrier of a certain spirit of the time, colour that breathes information. When Van Oeckel chooses green, it is not just any green, but green that silently tells a lot about a certain stylistic period.

In his sculptural work and installations, he further challenges his own premises. For instance, he tries to convert screen prints into 3D, so that it seems as if this abstract work is suddenly a representation of the sculpture. He takes us from abstraction to figuration and back again – thus creating a stalemate in his own artistic discourse.

(text by Annelies Vanbelle)