Gerard Bauwens (by Etienne Delbaere)
In his film essay, Erik Rohmer described the taste of the beauty, the classic as follows : the synthesis of intelligent tenderness and ingenuity in an artificial design.
In this century we have been submerged by a wave to the ugly, on behalf of social reality, elevated to artistic standard.
But the Polish-French painter Baltus also claimed the beauty in this insensible time.
The aggressive surrealism of Hans Bellmer didn't discourage him to go for the extreme refinement of figures and perform an almost perfect drawing, the portrait of the French philosopher Bacherlard.
Even many Italian artists followed the sense for beauty.
They have been inspired by the idealised picture from the classical antiquity, the renaissance, and have been part of a great culture.
Still, none of the German museum possess work of Paul Wanderlich, a passionate crusader of the aesthetic, but gigantic amounts have been paid for simply bad paintings of Salomé and others who didn't understand Matisse and Kirchner, neither Picasso, neither the most important temporary admirers of the free and wild tendens in Germany, Uïpertz or Volker Tannert.
They pay huge amounts for painters who mixed up rough and ugly with courage, originality, and call beauty conservative. The beauty in art has always been a sub-movement, it needs a lot of courage to stick to the aesthetic principles. This courage, ladies and gentlemen, Gerard Bauwens had from the start. His work fulfils completely the norm set up by Erik Tohmer. I believe that nostalgia to the classic is recently visible, that the absence of beauty is perceptible.
Gerard Bauwens offers us some consolation.
Not so much the woman or her eroticism seems to be the pattern of his works, but the beauty, the radiation of the nostalgic emotion, as by Hans Bellmer, the supreme elegance. All basic relations between people are erotic, but what a suffering for he who realises that in a world only interested in real facts, still believes that dreams are mystic, in a world not receptive to sensitivity.
The artwork of Gerard Bauwens is basically the work of someone not familiar with this world. He is locked up in himself, in a dream, in his solitary way of expressing, seeing, feeling.
For him the beauty is the most real heritage of human.
So he is searching the tenderness, the frail in intelligent compositions, who give evidence of free classic. In contrast to most of so-called new realists he doesn't isolate fragments from reality to reproduce it in detail and/or poetical, he doesn't want to know all about nothing, but is setting up an alternative world, apparently based on the visible,
but fundamentally different.
The most important is the loneliness, the spirit, the silence, the imagination. The girls on the beach are a dreamlike paradise, reminder of a perfect world. They are the beauty without language, the dream without story, the peace without death, away from reality.
They are perfect but fragile as everything cultivated in an artificial environment.
The artwork of Gerard Bauwens is a classic controlled romantic illusion,
but isn't all an illusion and an illusion all.
Presentation of my personality and the evolution in my work is as follows
The image that one have left by leaving the academy lead to obtain a very classical image with marking contours and filling ups.
The performance of art is a search for its own personality. By the start I have been compared to other artists as Rik Wouters and Permeke because of the spontaneity and the power of which my works have been set up.
Later on I have been compared with Pol Mara due to the aesthetic design.
And so it goes on. I am pleased in what I am doing now and also what I used to bring earlier, it is very personal concerning the technique and idea.
From the beginning, by the first exhibitions, I have set up my own technique in a way that my style is personal (as they compare it with Van Gogh who had also his specific technique).
In the beginning I worked only with charcoal, later on with pencil.
A few years ahead it grows up into painting and all the time with the obstinacy to maintain the technical aspect.
The idea that was typical for all those years is to use the human body as central point in all the different themes during those years. Among the themes are romanticism, sensuality, eroticism, freedom, awakening, aesthetics, nature …
The most important in my work is now the strong contrast of the human being against nature, in which form and dimensions, unrealistic, are brought back to the essential point of the image. by using my own curling technique
Referring to the technique, some of the important characteristics of drawing influence the composition of the painting and also the rhythm of the curls that make that the figure flow together with the nature.
The technique is original and not classic, that mean without contour.
A few words about the theme and the real sense. The persons are still important and even more significant. During some of my last voyages, the influence of the nature I observed have given a new dimension to the persons in my work, the sense of belonging to nature, while in spite of it all nature is the primal power mankind.
That's why I will accentuate the core of the theme and this will influence my vision to join the two components in a playful way, so that the theme and the technique make the composition illusive, in a way that not the figure and even not nature are important, but the concept becomes significant by observing my work.
Bauwens gerard