André Van Schuylenbergh Picture ◊ Perfect

The Van Hoe Collection Grammar of Textiles

“The vertical line is the line of life! The horizontal line is the line of death.” — Dan Van Severen

In the seventies, he responds to the starkness of his teacher, Van Severen 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. No sign of any neo-dadaism à la Broodthaers. nor of any naive neoexpressionism 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. What Van Schuylenbergh produced was big-city pop art as imagined by someone living in Aalst, yet exuding Roy Lichtenstein’s shiny glamour, drawing on pop culture—a couple of symbols of which dangle from the canvas. 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 have arrived. The nod to Salome is undeniable. Graffiti art, spilling over from New York, gets an upgrade. Is André a Keith Haring from Aalst? 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’...