Bruno Vekemans

Bruno Vekemans is an artist with a soul,
always preoccupied with colour and form.
He creates a new reality which is both recognizable
and alienating at the same time.

A few years ago he developed a personal style,
primarely working with gouache on paper,
a style which can be found both in his colour and in his black and white etchings.

Bruno Vekemans also confirms his talent with his 'églomisés', smaller paintings on glass. Nowadays he
concentrates on larger works, using oil on canvas.

Bruno Vekemans was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1952.

A powerful and mature artist. He has become adept at capturing the subtleties of the city's mood and atmosphere.

Whether he is depicting the inhabitants of the city or the city itself, one does not only look at his work, but feels the deep emotion that resonates from within his paintings.

Vekemans' tired waiters and cafe patrons lend a melancholy feeling to his work, however his subjects do not exude a sense of complete emptiness, as much as a recharging of their energy. He freezes the moment when there is the opportunity for a brief moment of relaxation and an opportunity for his subjects to take a brief reprieve from the work ahead of them. Therefore, the melancholy feeling given to the work by the almost monochromatic colour schemes is tempered by the relaxation of the subjects. His city scenes are ones of cold aesthetic beauty. They are desolate, devoid of any human presence. It's as if the human inhabitants are taking a time out from the real-life bustle of the city and the city is taking time off from the inhabitants that make it a thriving metropolis. While, the city and inhabitants could not exist independently, Vekemans makes a clever point of giving the viewer the opportunity to see the city in its silently cold beauty, and its inhabitants free, from the city's oppressiveness, with an opportunity to let their hair down in a quiet cafe.

With kind permission of www.caitlyngallery.com
(St. Louis - USA)