Jan Van Imschoot
The Haphzardness of Opinions
For the first time, this spring, the Flemish painter Jan Van Imschoot unveils a previously unseen facet of his work: 45 drawings paying tribute to major figures of French literature.
Now recognized as one of the leading names in contemporary Belgian painting, Jan Van Imschoot, the self-proclaimed master of “anarcho-baroque,” brings to his grand oil compositions a bold and erudite reinterpretation of the legacy of the great masters. His works blend formal and philosophical reflections on art history, drawing connections from Tintoretto to Luc Tuymans, with echoes of Goya and Matisse.
In this unprecedented new body of works on paper, Jan Van Imschoot anchors his artistic explorations in two key literary figures: Albert Camus, whom he admires for his extraordinary life and his commitment, and Marcel Proust, whose “philosophy of boredom” fascinates him. Their portraits and the depiction of their destinies are set alongside a series of interior drawings from the 1970s. Inspired by photographs, these settings offer narratives on the margins of history, elegant in some cases, vaguely Buñuelian in others. The assembled perspectives testify to a delicate balancing act between order and chaos. A dialogue is established between these recent series and C’est beau c’est belge, a body of work created in 1999 and never exhibited before.
For Jan Van Imschoot, drawing is a medium that challenges entrenched habits: “What I love about this medium is that, unlike oil painting, drawing offers only one chance,” he explains. “Once a line is drawn, it cannot be erased or reworked. I have always embraced its irreversibility. It is a play of color that I attempt to control, a dance with the pencil that I have been exploring for decades »
Born in 1963 in Ghent, Jan Van Imschoot has been living and working in France since 2013. The Ghent SMAK held a major solo exhibition of his work in 2002. More recently, his paintings have been shown at the Dusseldorf Kunstpalast (2005), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle (2008), National Art Museum of China in Beijing (2010) and Fondation Volume ! in Rome (2012). In 2018, he took part in the group exhibition Sanguine/Bloedrood curated by Luc Tuymans for the M HKA in Antwerp and Fondazione Prada in Milan, and in Feast of Fools, Bruegel Rediscovered at Château de Gaasbeek in Belgium in 2019. The Roger Raveel Museum hosted the 7th Biennial of Painting on the theme of inner spaces in 2020, where Van Imschoot showed four large paintings from his Interiors series. In 2024, the Ghent SMAK held a major retrospective of his work, The End is Never Near. Jan Van Imschoot has been represented by Galerie Templon since 2015.
The artist
Born in 1963 in Ghent, Jan Van Imschoot has been living and working in France since 2013. Jan Van Imschoot’s exploration of the possibilities offered by painting have resulted in a body of work that draws its power from highly critical and dramatic themes and contains references to countless artists, from Tintoret to Luc Tuymans, Goya to Matisse. Jan Van Imschoot places his figures, decors and narratives at History’s margins, using assembled perspectives, strong tones, bodies in motion and brushwork he describes as ‘anarcho-baroque’. His work delves into a number of recurring motifs: freedom, censorship and the violence of political and ideological systems.
