Jeroen Boute (1978, Ghent) has been painting for quite some time, but has only recently come out with his work. Boute is an art scholar, so his paintings contain numerous art historical references that he collects in a very free, intuitive way from various publications, social media, etc.. in an ever-expanding personal image archive, from which he draws freely and at his own discretion. The result is a highly eclectic painting practice in which he brings together various (art) historical styles and art movements - ranging from Baroque and Mannerism over Expressionism to more modernist strategies such as grid geometry, collage and ready-made - on relatively small-scale canvases into an almost explosive whole. What is fascinating about this is that Jeroen Boute always manages to convincingly link his historical insight to the purely painterly pleasure of the control - or letting go of it - of merely applying paint to canvas. Boute's painterly strategy is that of deconstruction and reconstruction, in which he repeatedly balances in a contagious manner on the thin tightrope between knowledge and intuition, between what seems correct or just wrong to him, as an ever-rebooted mental "attempt" to find the ultimate balance between excelling in and colliding with the limits of the medium of painting...:
"Les essais, c'est tout... Oh merveille!" (A. Giacometti, 1965)
Thibaut Verhoeven
"Experimentation is everything... Oh wonder!"