Jean De Groote: Physis
Jeroen Laureyns, Johan Debruyne
MER. Books
€49,00
Belgian artist Jean De Groote (b. 1955), often called the “Painter of Silence,” works with precision and restraint. His subjects—a red-and-blue eraser, a coat rack, a bare frame—are stripped of any overt narrative. They sit in silent tension, as if caught between memory and forgetting, between form and disappearance.
There is no sentimentality in his shades of gray, no grand gestures in his palette. Instead, De Groote approaches his subjects with the same stoicism he carries in life. His objects, like his thoughts, are contained—they offer only what is essential. In their silence, they refuse easy interpretation.
His is a practice of reduction, of reducing the image to its core. The light, when it falls, does not reveal what is hidden, but clarifies what is already there. A moment of clarity, not revelation. A brief suspension of time.
De Groote’s paintings hold space for what is unspoken. In their restraint they reflect the quiet determination of a lone wolf, someone who moves with purpose, indifferent to the noise of the world. To see a painting by De Groote is to stand at the edge of an open field, where silence reigns and the horizon seems endless. It is a confrontation with the essence of things.
ISBN: 9789464946130
