Flemish painter, born in Mechelen (Malines, Belgium), 1943.
Education: Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Mechelen - National Higher Institute of Antwerp - State Normal School for Art in Hasselt - State Higher Institute for Arts of Brussels.
The artist lives and works in De Gieterij, a renovated foundry close to the Malines central railway station. The studio of 200m2 enables the creation of big works.
Mark Ruyters - (H)ART 08/03/2007 (free translation of a Dutch text by Marc Ruyters )
During the last 40 years Willy Van Eeckhout has eagerly defended abstract and gesture-related painting. In his previous works, he has exerted himself physically, but always with the necessary know-how, having kept in mind the lessons of the Flemish expressionists and of the American abstract expressionists.
He says that his latest creations are now definitely more appeased, as he uses the painting-knife instead of the brush. However, he continues to prefer an exuberant mixture of oils, colours, tonalities and pastes, affixed in broad lines.
On the other hand he also creates what he calls his “palimpsests”, which are works on paper on which scriptures, colours, poems, pieces of paper, gouaches and water-colours are superimposed, in various layers.
His recent canvasses have another characteristic : Willy Van Eeckhout uses paint which he received from JAS, a fellow-painter. This artist made and mixed himself his own colours and oils, and stored them in small plastic boxes. At first sight one might think that they are of a dominant grey-violet colour, but a judicious manipulation with the painting-knife results into astonishing tonalities. Actually, the present works are somewhat greyer than the previous ones. Van Eeckhout calls his new manner ‘homage to JAS”. The new era will last for quite a long time, until the last of the many plastic boxes will have been emptied.
Willem M. Roggeman - 1989
For a number of years, Willy Van Eeckhout has been producing two different sorts of work that complement each other in an unusual way. On the one hand there ware the oil or acrylic paintings on canvas, for which the description "Lyrical Abstraction" may be used, and whose most striking features are the importance of large, broad gestures and the use of pure, unmixed colours ...
... On the other hand there are the so-called palimpsests, works in acrylics or mixed media on both types that are autobiographical in character, though this is not equally clearly present in every work.
The paintings on canvas appear entirely abstract, and are so intented by the artist, but on closer examination one can yet discern figurative elements in them. These elements have eluded the control of reason and have crept unconsiously into the painting. The artist is only able to ascertain their presence when the painting is complete. The figurative elements that emerge from the play of lines and the areas of bright colour are not an explicit presence, but, rather, allude to plants, an arm, a leg, a torso or eyes. It is an organic world that is subtly evoked rathter tha directly expressed. They are fragments from a larger whole that is itself not expressed, which remains concealed or is reproduced under heavy disguise, hidden behind expansive gestures in paint richly and enthusiastically applied.
Each composition is born of chaos ...
Wim Toebosch - 1996
Willy Van Eeckhout is an impassionate, eruptive painter. Human beings and plants or impulses are reduced to large and audac brush-strokes which, such as currents in a wild river, flow agains each other and create a structure that concentrates an intense pow small space. It is in fact an abstract expressionism which does not reject but dissolves figuration in a powerful play of colours.
An evolution from the figuratif drawings and paintings to the abstract oil-paintings and collages took place, largely under Walter Vilain's influence.
In collaboration with authors like Willem M. Roggeman, Rob Goswin, Guy van Hoof and Frans Boenders, Van Eeckhout also produces contemporary palimsests, in which the legible and the illegible embrace each other: a tender masculine embrace of script and image. The critic Rob Goswin has described these paper works of art as 'plastic gems with vital coulour tones and corresponding gestural, almost calligraphic, signs' . |
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1) Collaboration with met Rob Goswin |
