André Van Schuylenbergh - Picture Perfect

In the seventies, he responded to the starkness of his teacher with bright colours. He portrays his family and creates grotesques, with a nod to Francis Bacon’s distortions. Soon, he becomes a Flemish representative of pop art, a rarity. There is no sign of any neo-dadaism à la Broodthaers. nor of any naive neo-expressionism as presented by New Figuration at the time, with Raveel, who attached a pigeon cage to his canvas, as the urbanised painter of rural life.

It’s the Eighties. Grace Jones appears, or rather: her shadow, stylised by André Van Schuylenbergh. It is not just the striking shape of her head that comes into view, but the whole culture she represents. All the while, André remains true to the new aesthetic that has become the main characteristic of modern art: primitivism. Africa has taught us how to create a powerful image. Starting from 1984, the clear line of pop art is getting scrambled: the Neue Wilden has arrived.

This art form is forever indebted to Cobra... By the late eighties, this wild adventure had culminated in a love of abstraction. Which actually yielded a nice backdrop against which to allow figuration to reappear in the early nineties—this time with the addition of posters, stuck onto his canvas. His masterpiece from this period is a portrait of Louis Paul Boon. The collages exist side by side with exotic scenes, a return to a fairly clear-cut figuration featuring ladies in a sensuous colour bath. He who says ‘exotic’, is thinking ‘erotic’... – Extract text by Willen Elias