Coming from five generations of sculptors based and working in Antwerp, Bendt Eyckermans creates figurative paintings that are at once personal and historically critical. Like Hitchock film scenes, his works are characterised by contradictions and tensions, where tenderness meets aggression, hyperrealist imagery meets cartoonish fragments. With all his characters being his real-life friends, Eyckermans treats the process of painting as his way of processing his life and occurrences he finds himself in. At the same time, his practice makes a critical reference to a complex European colonialiasm entrenched in the history of art. The mysterious atmosphere of his works is accentuated by the use of dark colours, contrasts and unexpected perspectives. Eyckermans’s practice creates an uncanny juxtaposition between mundane, meticulously painted elements, such as peebles, driveways, cards, and his eerie subjects who appear to exist in a determined youth, while also being trapped in a self-aware Western existence. ...
