Benoît Hermans (1963)
Benoît Hermans provokes us to reflect on the effect and the meaning of an image as illusion. His paintings juxtapose completely unrelated images that jar our standard patterns of thinking and viewing behaviour. Hermans' work could not be further removed from pleasant, technically well-painted landscapes, still lifes or portraits; instead, he gives us alien images full of shock effects both small and large. The artist often combines existing photographs with self-painted fragments, comic art or elements from Western art history. His work shows us that a painting is a thing, however we might think that the image depicted is 'real,' rather than paint on a canvas stretched in a frame.
At the end of the nineteen eighties, Hermans began to use the collage technique as the basis for his assembled paintings, synthesizing existing image material, found objects and reproductions of familiar artworks into new images. By attaching all these elements to each other and introducing voids in them, the artist creates layers (literally and figuratively) within the work.
