In my first solo exhibition at Galeria Hilario Galguera in Madrid, I brought together work from two series. A new series of paintings from the “colourscape” series and the first works from a new series, the “rococo” paintings. Whereas the former show an abstract landscape in the form of a colour palette of 16×16 colours, the works from the “Rococo” series are purely formal. Lyrical abstract brushstrokes on an aluminium support or on canvas are overprinted with details from the landscape. The result is images that are difficult to understand at first glance but which are of a pure, frivolous beauty.

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In this solo exhibition at Les Jardiniers, an exhibition space in Montrouge near Paris, I presented an ensemble of works, each of which contained a duality. I entered into dialogue with the industrial character of the exhibition spaces and used raw (construction) materials in dialogue with refined materials and images.

Offscreen is an art fair in Paris, focussed on installations, still and moving images.

For this edition in the Grand garage haussmann I’ve created an installation that could stand free in the space and could be adapted to a possible next space.

I’ve squeezed 6 poles in between the ceiling and the floor and hung 6 Blueprints on them. One side was presenting 3 waves of Ostend, the other side 3 of Cornwall. These where accompanied by 2 colorscape paintings based on 2 pictures from Ostend and Cornwall.

Solo booth @Art Paris with Irène Laub Gallery

During Art Antwerp, I presented my first solo presentation at a fair. The ensemble consisted of 20 souvenirs based on 20 photos of the sea I took while walking the 64-km-long Belgian coast. I also showed 2 Blue -Prints, photos of a wave with a time fragment between both image layers. At the centre of the booth was a marble sculpture consisting of a slab of Belgian red marble and an Italian Calacatta marble. Both slabs are different sizes and appear in a fragile balance.

For my first expo at Hilario Galguera’s Mexican Gallery, I went to Mexico for a month in the spring with the plan to collect various “souvenirs” that I incorporated into new works. The title Horizontes refers to the line separating the visible from the invisible. The position of that line is determined by the eye level of the viewer. In the various works, I use my own eye level to determine the perspective of my memories. For this expo I presented for the first time ceramic work and work with two marble slabs each.The other work continued to build on series I developed earlier.

Souvenirs – Irène Laub Gallery Brussels

For his first solo exhibition at Irène Laub gallery, Stijn Cole presents a new body of work entitled «Souvenirs». Cole started creating these pieces upon moving back to Ghent during the first lockdown, as a tribute to the area of Chimay where he lived for several years. While seeking to visually capture specific moments in time, the artist came to realize that he was also, in a broader but more straightforward sense, representing moments in his own lifetime. In addition to several new paintings, he will be presenting sculptures made out of Carrara marble and Rouge de Rance marble, as well as two new bronze sculptures.

Shore – (re)D Gallery Antwerp

In this exhibition at the Antwerp (re)D Gallery, I brought together an ensemble of marines, 17 colors capes based on the colors of the sea in Calais, 4 bronze sculptures, 1 fold and a “Mexican wave”

Grey Blue Brown – White Gallery Ostend

During the summer of 2019 I presented a range of marines in a small gallery space in Ostend

Variations sur les mêmes thèmes – Anna Wenger gallery

This was my second solo show in the Zurich based gallery Anna Wenger

Finistère / Fisterra – Haus der Kunst Sölothurn

In the beautiful chapel that is the Haus der kunst in Solothurn, I showed 2 altarpieces based on the colors of nature. In the choir I exhibited some “blueprints”.

The blueprints are works where I present 2 pictures of the same skipping wave on top of each other. The older of the two (2 tenths of a second older) is printed in a monochrome blue, the newest in black on plexiglass.

The two altar pieces I made for the exhibition El Camino (LAC Narbonne). I made a road trip to Santiago together with my daughter, who was 10 at the time. The first destination of our journey was Finistère in Brittany, the most western point of France. From the cliffs I took a picture of the sunset in three directions, a few days later I did the same in Fisterra in Spain, another “end of the world”.  The two actions resulted in 2 painted altarpieces.

Entre terre et mer – (re)D Gallery Antwerp

In this exhibition at the Antwerp (re)D Gallery I brought together an ensemble of naval and landscapes, 5 Blue prints, 2 wax sculptures and 3 plaster works on which the sea is portrayed from 4 viewing angles.

1:1 Marine – C-Mine Genk

In Genk I showed 4 types of work, 5 colorscape diptychs, 2 sculptures, a diorama in Blue key with a light projection.In the centre of the room I placed a metal structure on which 10 large photos of waves were placed. These images are built up in two layers. A first layer in a monochrome colour and a second image that floats a few centimetres in front of it in black and white printed on plexiglass. Both images are of the same wave with a delay of 2/10 of a second in between. Because there is a space between both images, the work gains an extra dimension and the image seems to move.

1:1 – Château de Chimay

At the Chimay Castle, a castle that has been run by the same family for 1,000 years, I mapped out two routes that departed from a flag that stood in the courtyard, depicting the colors of the sunrise of a day just before the opening of the exhibition. From there you could visit the “maison des artistes” or the castle itself. In the “maison des artistes” I showed the “60 Journees d’été” series in dialogue with two works by Marthe Wery as I had already done in the Raveel Museum. In the castle itself, I dug deeper and deeper into time in a number of works. This started with two 1:1 drawings of classified trees found in the domain of the castle. In the next room I showed 2 wax sculptures that are exact replicas of pieces of the surface of mont Sainte Victoire in Aix en Provence. On two tables in the next room I printed 2 pictures of the Hubble telescope that at first glance have the drawing of marble but are images of parts of the universe. In the beautiful little theater, a copy of the theater in Fontainebleau, I left the documentary nature of the previous images and relied on photos I found on Google for a series of little works that were always divided into 2 plans. In the first and second scene of the stage, I hung two paintings based on a found photo “Sankt Gilgen en éte”.

New dialogues – Anna Wenger Gallery

For my first solo show at the Zurich Anna Wenger Gallery, I went in search of new interactions between the different series within my work. The exhibition was an introduction to almost all of my different media.

Chimay Cancale – (re)D Gallery Antwerp

In this exhibition I combined drawings and Colorscapes of the landscape (Chimay) with marines (Cancale). The drawings were conceived as rudimentary collages where the colors of a landscape were placed on top of a drawn image.

Images and colors – (re)D Gallery Antwerp

In my first solo exhibition at Hendrik Van De Weghe (re)D Gallery, I showed a series of drawings in which a glass plate was placed in front of the work each time, displaying 64 colors derived from the image. In between, I showed photographs from the series l’heure Bleue, camera obscura images that captured the light of 1 hour during a sunrise.

Sunset / Sunset – MSK Ghent

For this expo in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent I’ve made 7 installations, all 7 representing sunsets, in close dialogue with the collection and the building of the museum. Jan De Cock, Philippe Vandenbergh, Raoul De Keyser and Leo Copers where the former artists in this annual artist in residence programm.

Ohne Titel @KunstVerein Ahlen

Philippe Vancauteren had just started as director of SMAK and he invited me to make an exhibition for Kunstverein Ahlen in Germany.The space there was much too big for me, I didn’t have enough works, let alone works with which I wanted to be seen.  I painted an elementary landscape in green-key and blue-key with the horizon at my eye level on one (32 metre long) wall of the room. The room was darkened and 7 slide projectors were used to project light patches in the format of classic landscape paintings from various museum collections on top of it. The height of those patches was adjusted according to the position of the horizon on the paintings. In presentations, paintings are always hung with the centre at “eye level”, which usually varies from 155 to 160 cm. I found that when showing landscapes with a visible infinite horizon, a problem arose and adjusted the horizon of all those landscapes to my own eye height. Since then, the horizon, the subjective line that separates the visible from the invisible, has been a motif that recurs in many of my works.

Picture this! – MDD Deurle

In 2006 I was invited for a Picture This! expo (young artists) in MDD Deurle.

I combined a painting in 2 key colors with all the landscapes with an infinite horizon from the museum’s collection. In addition, I showed 2 daylight works and a fluorescent tube lamp that copied the light from outside with a sensor. on the daylight works, the colors of the sky are listed from left to right in a time bar. One of the two was an ordinary day, the other the birthday of my daughter, where the day normally starts at 0:00h this time bar started at 8:13 so the night falls in the middle of the image.