RICHARD VANDEWALLE [ART]

My goal in painting is to create an illusion—like looking through glass or recalling a memory. A subject and its form matter only when they stir something within us. To evoke that emotional response is my ultimate aim as an artist.

contemporary artist inspired by light, emotion, and powerful expression.

BREIF PERMANENCE

Richard Vandewalle’s paintings emerge from a fusion of abstraction and representational art. Grounded in immediacy, where the physical act of painting becomes inseparable from the image itself. The surface is a field of negotiations. The painting navigates this shifting and sometimes convoluted terrain between control and chance, a tension that mirrors the unpredictability and intricacy of everyday life.

Forms are constructed and disrupted, defined and subsequently destabilised, as the artist negotiates the space between intention and unpredictability. The painting records its own becoming: every alteration and interruption contributes to a surface in which order and disorder coexist.

Materiality is central to this tension. Line, pigment, gesture, and texture retain distinct identities while simultaneously influencing one another. Controlled marks intersect with loose deposits of paint; concentrated passages give way to areas of dissolution; contours appear momentarily before being absorbed into surrounding colour and atmosphere. Traces of the figure emerge through this unstable field. Presence is suggested rather than fixed, creating an image that oscillates between recognition and disappearance.

Vandewalle’s paintings consequently resist the expectation of a resolved image. Their meaning does not reside solely in what is represented, but in the persistent tension between what the artist intends and what the medium permits. A deliberate gesture can become transformed through the movement of wet paint, while an incidental mark may acquire unexpected significance. The accidental is not treated as a failure of control, but as an integral component of the work’s visual intelligence.

It is within this unresolved condition that the paintings acquire their particular intensity. They do not offer permanence as certainty, but reveal it as something provisional: an image briefly held together before it shifts once again.