Tom Woestenborghs
'For as long as it lasts'
Tom Woestenborghs (B, 1978) starts from the voluptuousness, richness, and excess that characterizes painters such as Fragonard and Boucher during the Rococo: a style era that plays the last notes with the collapse of the Ancien Régime.
He draws substantive and formal parallels; he translates the style characteristics of the Rococo to the here and now. The big difference is that the works at Woestenborghs are fraught with a kind of threat. A darkness that hides behind the shining facade and that holds up a mirror to us.
Therefore, the core of this series is to ask whether we have returned to this point. Are we blinding ourselves with excess in all its forms to deny the end of our epoch?
Woestenborghs is a visual artist who uses photographic images as the basis for his collages. The work has a painterly slant, but Woestenborghs has exchanged paint and brush for the cutting knife and adhesive plastic. This material produces a brighter color palette and higher sharpness than paint. He shows his collages as 'paintings' but also as light boxes. He obtained his Masters Degree at St. Lucas and his postgraduate degree at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Antwerp.
Florens Kool
'Dusty'
'Substance expression' is the translation of paint to another material. It is a term often associated with classical painting in which painters of yesteryear managed to convey beautiful exclusive fabrics such as silk and lace seamlessly.
What painting techniques are behind this, and how can paint imitate another material and make it tangible?
Florens Kool studied Fine Arts at the Minerva Academy Groningen. He works and lives in Deventer. In his work, Florens Kool uses classical painting techniques and skills, such as expression of texture, color and shadow, perspective, and illusionism, to depict everyday settings and objects and place them in an unexpected perspective. He is interested in a form of realism in which contemporary everyday subjects are incorporated into balanced compositions. He strongly emphasizes the treatment of the paint and how it relates to the material it expresses.
Due to its size and precision, his work evokes attentiveness in the viewer. The precise representation of prosaic details brings the viewer into contact with images that usually pass us by in all their banality. In this way, his work gives space to the less sensational aspects of our everyday environment.