The Brussels art scene is off to a strong start this fall. Galerie Templon is opening its season with Matthieu Ronsse. In Belgium, this Ghent-based painter is well-known for blurring the lines between abstraction and figuration, between Rembrandt and contemporary visual culture. His canvases resemble pictorial battlefields: they emerge from raw gestures, display ghostly silhouettes, and contain fragments of memory. And yet, this is his first time exhibiting at Templon in Brussels.
The exhibition is titled "Hotel Prado." The name evokes a hotel in Ostend, the coastal city where Ronsse lives and works. But here, there's no anecdotal reference. It's a metaphor: a temporary room, a fragmentary space, an ephemeral passage. For a few weeks, the artist offers a glimpse into his intimate world, comprised of some twenty recent paintings and installations.
Unwilling to present a museum-style display or a polished narrative, Ronsse transforms the gallery into an extension of his studio. The apparent chaos becomes visual poetry. His works breathe incompleteness, oscillating between appearance and disappearance. The image, never static, is constantly reconstructed.
In Ronsse's work, the masters of the past are never far away. Rembrandt, Titian, and Velázquez appear in the background, like watchful specters. But these references are not mere homages. They act as "Trojan horses," to borrow the expression of critic Guy Gilsoul, capable of cracking our mental certainties.
Alongside these prestigious figures, the artist also evokes contemporary artists: the Americans Paul Thek and David Hammons, and the Colombian Oscar Murillo. A skillful and instinctive mix that testifies to the eclecticism of his pictorial vocabulary.
The exhibition plays with scale. Some canvases occupy the space in a spectacular way: Nobody No Dream (3,75 × 3,20 meters), Last Post for Jokes (3 × 3 meters), or even Funny Horse Club (3 × 3 meters).
Others, smaller in size, invite a disturbing intimacy: Self (40 × 30 centimeters), Portrait of Louise (102 × 72 centimeters) or The Lies of Dylan (72 × 102 cm). Whether monumental or discreet, they all share the same principle: to leave visible the marks of the making, the corrections, the accidents. Here, the painting shows itself in its nakedness, with its flaws and breaks.
What is striking about Ronsse's approach is the importance he places on the process rather than the final image. The painting is simultaneously support, trace, and tool. It retains the marks of the gesture, the deliberate accidents, the imperfect superimpositions. No exhibition is ever truly finished: the works can evolve, transform. Incompleteness is fertile; it nourishes creative freedom.
This freedom is also a risk. The artist chooses to show what is usually hidden: the drip, the mistake, the experiment. The viewer is confronted with a painting that rejects fixed perfection in order to assert a raw and intuitive vitality.
Born in Kortrijk in 1981, and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2003, Matthieu Ronsse has built a substantial career. His solo exhibitions have been held at the Roger Raveel Museum (Zulte, 2020), Social Harmony (Ghent, 2018), the Bonner Kunstverein (Bonn, 2010), and the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle, 2006). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including SMAK in Ghent (2025), Lille3000 (2014), Sint-Baafs Kathedraal in Ghent (2012), and the Prague Biennale (2007). His work circulates widely in Europe and confirms his place among the most distinctive painters of his generation.
« Matthieu Ronsse – Hotel Prado »
Veydtstraat 13, Brussels (Belgium)
Until 31 October 2025
