About Hans Vandekerckhove

Friedl' Lesage
Journalist/VRT-Radio

The discovery of the Horizon. Biographic notes, Jan. 2007

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Dieter Roelstraete, curator MuHka
In the Beginning, there was St Jerome

The painting by Jeroen (or Jerome, or Hieronymus) Bosch in the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts could be taken as the symbolic starting point of the story of the creation of Hans Vandekerckhove's painterly oeuvre. Now the fact that this very same painting also happens to be a variation (albeit a typically Boschian one) on the widespread theme of St Jerome , the devout hermit with a penchant for austerity and introspection, will turn out to be far from accidental.

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Willy Van den Bussche
Former Head Curator, PMMK, Ostend

Hans Vandekerckhove entered the artistic world during the painterly turbulence of the early eighties. After a period dominated by conceptual art and cool, impersonal abstraction, it was time for a revaluation of painting. The most striking element in this new painting was personal enthusiasm. The emphasis on expression and the importance of the act of painting sometimes led to a form of abstract expressionism.

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Joannes Késenne
Lecturer in Art Psychology at the Limburg Provincial College

Who is afraid of the painting, the written image and the blindman?

'... and death closed the eyes that so admired their owner's beauty.'

From Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book III , the passage in which Narcissus falls in love with himself and dies.

Hans Vandekerckhove's work looks like sentences in the form of a question. And the question is, what is the question! What is it about? What question do his characters ask themselves?

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