GALERIE TIM VAN LAERE
But what makes Ben Sledsens so successful? Spotted by the eminent Antwerp gallery owner Tim Van Laere before he had even graduated, the Belgian painter (born in 1991 in Antwerp) can no longer satisfy all the commissions he receives - to the point of having a waiting list - while each of his new exhibitions is a sold-out ! Who would have thought that his large figurative canvases, with their naïve brushstrokes and vivid colors, would be so successful? Could it be precisely because they seem timeless? Perhaps we should see them as an antidote to our disenchanted world.
Drawing on the mythology of naive painters (from Pieter Brueghel the Elder to Henri Rousseau) and the great colorists (Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, James Ensor, Claude Monet...) and creating his own mythology, Ben Sledsens' painting is indeed a re-enchantment. In the Yellow Forest (2022), Moon Above the Lake (2018), Girl Lying in the Grass (2019), Girl in the Blue Room (2020) ... " In his large-scale canvases, he reveals fragments of his imaginary world, a utopia in which he would like to live himself", a universe of acidulous fairytale colors. In this "new world", imbued with an "idyllic radiance" and devoid of shadows, where the elements of the "real world" - from surrounding nature or his everyday environment - appear enlarged, idealized, as if transfigured by unreal light and pure colors, there nevertheless hovers a "disquieting strangeness". In his landscapes, inhabited by animals or women stretched out on flowerbeds, as in his carefully composed portraits of interiors, a troubled feeling emanates, a muted tension seemingly ready to shake this overly polished, overly perfect world. And the painter, beyond the sweet flavors of his candy-pink or canary-yellow monochromes, sows a few anomalies here and there to draw us out of this Utopian daydream. Such is the case with the all-blue crockery on the china cabinet, which itself seems contaminated by the blue splashed on the door and wall of the Woman in the blue roomwhose dark eyes and shiny boots cannot go unnoticed...
TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY
Jos Smolderenstraat 50,
Antwerp (Belgium)
