'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.