Artist Spotlight - Karel Vereycken — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

Biography

Born in 1957 in Antwerp, Karel VEREYCKEN graduated from the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels and trained in engraving at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, where he obtained a certificate of passage « with distinction. » His parents worked in the port and the ship repair industry. Their adolescence, studies and careers were reduced to zero by the war period and the need to bring an income and feed their brothers, parents and family. So for their children, his parents thought they should get the occasion to fully enjoy and explore the cultural dimensions.

The Death of Melancolia, 2022. Etching on zinc, entaglia, roulette, aquatinto, 39,5 x 58,5 cm.

His mother, who was prevented by the war to become an opera singer, got Karel into a music school. But at that time, the teaching methods, basically learning to read scores for two years before ever being allowed to sing, were so repugnant that he ran away from that. As an alternative, his mother sent him to a communal drawing school of Schoten, directed by a talented Flemish sculptor named Herman CORNELIS. The bearded cigar-smoking giant would rip pages out of old books and stick them in Karel's hands saying “copy this!”

The Return of Poseidon, 2022. Watercolor on Arches paper, 39 x 59 cm.

At the same time, his father would take him every weekend to visit the numerous museums of Antwerp where paintings of Bruegel, Rembrandt, Matsys, Bosch, Rubens, Patinir, Van Eyck and many other Flemish masters were on show. His father couldn’t really explain why, but somehow knew this was somehow very important. Antwerp has harbors the well-preserved XVIth century print shop of Christopher Plantin, a French humanist who worked in that city in the 16th century with many cartographers such as Mercator and Ortelius, whose engraved globes and printed maps impressed deeply Karel.

Stairway to Heaven, 2018. Etching on zinc. Entaglio, roulette, aquatinto, 39 x 27 cm.

Then, at age 12, Karel won his first art prize and his tutor convinced his mother “there was precious talent” in her son. With that advice, she sent him to Brussels to attend the Saint Luke Art School and study Plastic Arts. Some teachers were quite annoying but others got him into deep study of anatomy, examining Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer’s groundbreaking studies. He continued another two years at the Ecole Royale des Beaux Arts of Brussels to study copper engraving and graduated “with distinction.”

Cattle raisers from Sudan, 2016. Etching on zinc, intaglio, aquatinto, 24,5 cm x 39 cm.

Karel then moved to Paris, invited by friends, and worked as a journalist, historian, researcher and editor of a non-commercial militant paper. But after some years, he found out that making art was really essential for his life so he returned to it. First by producing copies of old masters painting on wooden oak panels with hand-made egg tempera, venitian turpentine and various other ancient oil techniques he and and old school mate rediscovered.

Shrimp fisher of Oostduinkerke, 2017. Etching on copper. Intaglio, roulette, aquatinto, 39 cm x 27,5 cm.

Since the people that ordered these copies took them home, at the end of the day, Karel had nothing to put on show. Therefore, he returned to watercolors and etching. Being a passionate pedagogue, he also gave a three year drawing course of for some of his friends, mainly amateurs and beginners who were happy to get started. Today, in France, as a member of the Fédération nationale de l’estampe, he confirmed his technical mastery at Atelier63 in Paris and continued to improve his skills as a member of the Montreuil workshop of Halfdan Halbirk, the son of the Danish engraver Bo Halbirk.

Saint-Guilhem-le-désert, 2019. Watercolor, 38 cm x 28,5 cm.

Artist Statement

What always attracted Karel in painting and Plastic arts is the way art “makes visible” things and ideas that are “not visible” as such in the simple visible world but which “appear” by some sort of magic in the minds of the viewer. It took him over twenty years to sort out the difference between “symbols” (a “convention” accepted among a group or a code system designed to communicate a secret meaning), and “metaphor” which, by assembling things unusual, by irony and paradox, allows the individual mind to “discover” the meaning the painter intended to transmit.

The cherry tree, 2019. Etching on zinc, intaglio, roulette, aquatinto, 13,5 cm x 27 cm.

Such an approach, says Karel, offers the joy of discovery and surprise, a profound human quality. Modern art started as a non-figurative form of symbolism till “contemporary” art brought many artists to put an axe into the very idea of poetical meaning and even meaning per se.
In 1957, the CIA sponsored, under various covers and often without the artists even knowing about it, many “abstract” artists to promote a form of art that it considered coherent with its ideology of “free enterprise.”

Vallemagne Abbay, 2024. Watercolor on Arches, 42,5 cm x 58 cm

Completely different is what inspires Karel: true human culture, be it Chinese painting of the Song dynasty, the Buddhist sculptures of Gandhara, the early Flemish masters or the magnificent bronze heads of Ifé in current Nigeria. Bridging the distances in space and time, religion and philosophy, stands the celebration of unique human capacities, that of compassion, empathy and creative love.

Haussman ambiance, 2022. Etching on zinc, intaglio, roulette, aquatinto, 23 cm x 37 cm.

Karel considers his work as part of a teaching activity, as a sort of humanistic intellectual guerrilla “warfare.” Even if he appreciates selling his works, and getting more resources available for his activities, he definitely is not out to please a given public or to market an aesthetic object. What counts for him is to get viewers to reflect on how “art” can be a “window” to a dimension people intuitively know as important but were never given access to or even dare to go.

Orb Valley, 2020. Watercolor. 38 cm x 28,5 cm.

Karel also took dozens of friends on guided tours at the Louvre in Paris, to the Frankfurt Museum or to the Metropolitan in New York. Knowing history of ideas and civilizations helps a lot to penetrate artworks. Some of these guided visits have been audio-taped and are available on his website. After these tours, most of those he guided thanked him warmly saying “I never even suspected to what degree ideas are transmittable through paintings.”

London, 2011. Etching on zinc, intaglio, vernis mou, aquatinto, 51,5 cm x 27 cm.

Karel says that it takes a lot of courage to overcome the fear to be “completely alone” while you walk a road nobody ever walked on. Everything starts by having a “spark” of imagination and forge it into paradoxical metaphors. As an example, he presents his work "Stairway to Heaven" (color etching on zinc). It started with his examination of the fantastic Chinese landscape paintings. Going through pictures of Chinese landscapes, he realized some of these paintings were not pure imagination but based on landscapes that really existed. The most fascinating of them are certainly those of an area called “Yellow mountains.”

Who is There? Etching on zinc. Sugar etching, 24 cm x 38 cm.

Now at that time, Karel was also unraveling the way the Flemish painter Joachim Patinir painted his landscapes, as objects for religious contemplation. In the latter’s painting, man is seen, as in Augustinian philosophy, as a pilgrim, who has to learn how to detach himself from earthly possessions, that attachment considered a source of evil. The pilgrim is at the crossroads. By his free will he has to decide, either to take the easy road downhill or the difficult road uphill where he will reach out by going through a small gate.

Castle of Rumbeke, 2024. Watercolor, 30 cm x 30 cm.

So in his etching, Karel “married” a landscape from this Flemish school (on the left) with a view of China’s Yellow mountain. Initially, I had left out the pilgrim, but by working on the landscape, the idea came back to my mind. To accentuate that the road downhill was the road to evil, he added an owl, in Flemish folk art a symbol of evil since able to see in the dark and to grab you in your weakness.
So, as one of his friends says, “behind Karel’s works, there’s always a story,” but it is up to you to discover it !

https://artkarel.com/