Store #8

Bert Huyghe

http://www.berthuyghe.be/    http://berthuyghe.tumblr.com/

Man Forced To Watch Painting With Own Eyes
Man Forced To Watch Painting With Own Eyes, 40 x 30 cm, olieverf, lak en mixed media op hout, 2015

Making a selection of the young oeuvre of Bert Huyghe (*1989, Sint-Laureins, currently living in Ghent) is not an easy task. He paints, composes collages and vinyl and is a performer. In DAVID Store, he’ll present an overview of his paintings, his darlings, as he above all sees himself as a true painter.

We find Huyghe working in his studio, wearing his football shorts and shirt. He paints screamy football shirts and enters the terrain like the big stars, the Golden Boys. It may seem far-fetched, but Huyghe is a painter who fights the battle of the football player on canvas. His paintings are both abstract and figurative and are, in a way, relatable to the work of Raoul De Keyser (1930 – 2012), also a fan of football. De Keyser is celebrated for his forms borrowed from football fields and chalk lines. Huyghe paints the world surrounding him in a similar way. He plays football and follows the sport in his writing: “The super small sport socks look stupid, no? Even worse than the raised socks of football players?” Huyghe always gets slightly rougher and more expressive. When we believe that he paints landscapes, he begins to mislead us. Stupid figures appear, roughly outlined. The brutality suddenly splashes from the canvas when he gives us a head-butt in Who’s Fooling Who???. This has its consequences. Both his works of art and his body symbolize another way of life. During a performance in SMAK, Huyghe gets the label Golden Boy tattooed all over his chest.

Expositions/publications: You’re Gonna Miss Me Baby, published by Naives & Visionaries, Berlin, (2015, DE), Coming People, SMAK, Ghent (2014), Solo LP release, Museum M, Leuven, (2013), Namedropping 7 inch, WIELS, Brussels (2012), Bert Huyghe graduates from Luca School of Arts, Ghent (2012, BE).

Vertaling/Translation: Dylan Belgrado