David DeWeerdt

Born in Berchem Saint Agathe (Belgium) in 1967, David Deweerdt is a plastic artist & animator of workshops of artistic expressions, intervener with population coming from psychiatry and or carrying mental disability.

“Graduated from the painting section of Academy of Braine l’Alleud (Belgium), David Deweerdt has exhibited in many countries over Europe and won various awards as the Special Prize of the Strassen Art Biennial (Luxemburg) in 2017.”

Statement about selected work

“In my pictorial work, I try to convey a certain point of view on what surrounds us, on how I perceive human beings because my paintings are often faces and bodies. I try to convey my feelings about others through body envelopes.

I always work on the human being, on the body, on the soul, on the sensations. I work little with objects, little or no with landscapes. My characters are mediums, and through them, I often try to convey sensations, for example, coldness or lightness. My works are often dark, with violence, torn beings, and heartbreaking. It is sometimes the expression of feelings that I feel and that I make appear through these characters. These characters are ultimately only pretexts… I try to produce a sensation, based on what the character exudes and to awaken something in the viewer.

For many years, I have painted physical differences and deformities by questioning the aesthetic norms of our current Western societies. Today, my work questions Man in his paradoxes.

When I paint the Woman, she is dreamlike, tenebrous, and tormented and her body becomes the envelope that shelters our most primitive fears and fantasies. My goal is not to seek aesthetics but to question the emotion that sleeps in the other. My naked women, with a paradoxical aestheticism, since I represent them as both attractive and repulsive, come to question Men about the sensuality of our bodies and the form it can take for each of us.

In my painting, we find an excessive physical shaping to reveal a new aestheticism, a new approach to the pictorial representation of the body.”