NEO-KHRYPILISM

My old mate Lucas Simon Denis visited me and whilst we were talking and listening to Soft Machine I set up my easel and took some paint. The subject of the conversation came to beauty. And I exclaimed that to me a painting did not have to be beautiful, that it could be ugly also. And whilst he smoked some weed and we drank some wine, I started what I intended to be a really ugly painting. It became this one. When it was finished around three in the morning, he came up with the title. Manifesto of Neo-Khrypilism. A movement that is so innovative and new there never has been an original of it, and it already starts with a Neo-version.

A painting, or any work of art can be beautiful, but that's a choice. And what someone finds beautiful someone else interprets as ugly, or shocking, or even dangerous. To me, it's more important that an artwork touches me below the surface, and that it is charged to the maximum.

It was also my last painting of the first period. I haven't shown all as many are lost, even so lost I don't remember them, but this was the last one. I was dissatisfied with my painting and after a shocking visit to the Groeninghe Museum in Bruges where I faced Van Eyck's Madonna with Canon Vanderpaele I wanted something else. So I kept on drawing, and experimenting like an alchemist with all possible ingredients to find an entry to the world of translucency.