Poet, cantor of the brush, the painter plunges us without warning into a world from which we do not come out unscathed. We discover the paintings punctuated with sketches, multiple stories born from the observation of everyday life. Our sense of sight is on alert. Despite the alignment of the images, he is authorized to take the key of the fields. Our gaze follows the path of schoolchildren. It looks like a sparrow, in the painter's "garden", which goes left, right, comes back, leaves, flutters, takes flight to land a little further. Nothing is set in stone, has to be. The paths are made, are undone. Unbeknownst to us, a crisscrossing network is then woven, stretched right through the painting. Tension savored drop by drop. In his works, a whole small people evolve where man, woman, mermaid, bird, palm boat, ... everyday objects bathed in their living environment meet: sea, beach, garden, street, city, village, ... A very personal mythology that inhabits the self-taught painter.

It is built on "everyday celebrations": meteorological observations, calendar of hours, days, months, years, sound environment, ... In this luxuriant walk, it often happens that at the bend of a path you will find meets the “I” who places himself as an actor in the middle of his poetic universe. If we let the gaze hang in, the trap of this web closes and we let ourselves be swallowed up with relish. Flushes of emotion, of tenderness that seizes the viewer. It seems to him to commune with the heart of the artist, which never flutters very far. There are also works that favor a unique “image”. These give the impression that a detail of the previous ones is magnified like a photographic zoom. Shapes and figures not always defined emerge.

One constant is the presence of allusive writing which punctuates drawings and paintings but never precedes them, giving them balance and breathing.

Chantal Bauwens