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Between symbolism, poetic realism and avant-garde ferments.

The period between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was an extraordinarily fertile time for Belgian painting. While I was growing up in the center of Paris, the Belgians created an autonomous pictorial voice, characterized by a wonderful balance that fed on reality, a tension of symbolism and an early impetus against the avant-garde.
A transitional controversy
In this case, Belgian painting is not uniform: it tends to be diverse, sometimes in conflict. Some artists remain attached to naturalism and the realist legacy, refracting rural landscapes, domestic scenes or seascapes with attention to light and atmosphere. Others, however, move away from the visible to seek deeper and more interior meanings: this is how a flamboyant, intimate and visionary symbolism is born, distant from academic formulas.

- The power of landscape
The landscape occupied a central position: rolling hills, fields, windy beaches and dramatic skies become the scenery of the soul. Artists like Edmond Van Coppenolle, for example, reinterpret flaming nature with a sensitivity that combines descriptive precision and silent poetry. The flower is worked, purely decorative, it holds a deep intimacy, as if they were flowers that contain a fragment of suspended time.
- Influence of Symbolism
The influence of symbolism is deep and early: in Belgium the group "Les XX" was born in 1891, after which it was represented with the influence of decadent poetry, music and philosophy. Belgian symbolism is not only decorative or esoteric, its psychology, its spirituality, often melancholic. The figure is silent, immersed in interiority. The light in this theater, unreal, comes filtered by a state of animation.
- Between Modernity and Tradition
During the transition to the new year, Belgian painting even anticipated expressionism, purely maintaining its legacy with the solidity of the formal form. Unlike France, where color explodes in Fauvism and Cubism, in Belgium it is increasingly transformed into a meditative way. The composition remains figurative, my vibration of modern anxiety: alienation, solitude, urban transformation.