Joost Colpaert draws inspiration from water and rivers. He works this theme figuratively with maps and landscapes, but also in the abstract. In his videos, maps and landscapes, water – as a driving natural force – is translated into a personal visual language. What emerges is a language of form to which droplets, rivers, lakes, the sea, polders and even pails often revert. Human folly as an inherent part of our existence shown in the maps and landscapes referring to the same theme: bird’s eye views of landscapes and maps with drop-like shapes.
“In other works which show an affinity with ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’, it is noticeable how Joost Colpaert directs his motifs like a group circle dance, with mysterious white indentations reminiscent of playful water droplets. In another work, a black figure poses with a bucket as if playing a showman, surrounded by some of those same abstract water droplets, in this version painted in shades of blue. A constant in this work is the flat, methodical background, a kind of land registry which becomes a podium for the enigmatic figures playing a game, or who could present a danger to the world. Joost Colpaert subconsciously knows how to imbue his recent work with insinuations of unconscious rebellion. These are images which create a certain sense of unease. Colpaert plays with motifs and shifts these, work after work, over and through one another to create vessels, full of contradictory layers of meaning. The directionless and ‘rootless’ also prevails in the work of Joost Colpaert. He rejects all forms of reference to a specific locality, as he does navigation.
Joost Colpaert lives and works on the periphery of the art cities. In Ename in Oudenaarde he looks out across the undulating landscape of the Flemish Ardennes. Joost Colpaert works slowly and painstakingly on a body of work in which his horizon repeatedly and elusively shifts, because in Ename, he is on a permanent mental journey without a compass. A journey which leads him to new images, images which continue to challenge us, and which broaden our own horizon.”
Luk Lambrecht

OPENING :
Friday 8th March 19 - 21 Uhr

mpefm GERMANY art press release