“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Tuesday July 19th — —

The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Tuesday July 19th — —

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Tuesday July 19th — —

Fleur de Roeck

We discovered the work of the very talented Belgian visual artist Fleur de Roeck by chance in Autumn of last year, while eating an excellent lunch, as it was being exhibited in the Antwerp-based lunchroom Maison Tartine. The owners of Tartine have Ethiopian roots (and also run the excellent Ethiopian restaurant Gojo across the street from Tartine), which is reflected in its interior, tastefully combined with warm, wooden, Scandinavian design influences — proving to be a perfect environment for the captivating work of the 2014 Graphic Design graduate of the Antwerp-based Royal Academy of Arts.

Working in a remarkable color palette, de Roeck’s captivating paintings and collages represent her vision of the world around us in jaunty brush strokes and Matisse-like graphical abstract forms. Although there’s no real grid to be observed in her compositions, having a flowing organically inspired nature, somewhere her schooling in graphic design still shines through in the juxtapositioning of the different forms in her paintings, at times reminding us of the work by English graphical Masters Jay Cover, William Edmonds and Nicolas Burrows, who together form the Nous Vous collective. Finding inspiration in the w0rk of Pierre Alechinsky and Per Kirkeby and on the other hand just by looking, at what nature has to offer us and studying form ranging from architecture to design and art, we can only hope for more beautiful translations of those encounters in more expressions of De Roeck’s exciting, uplifting and colorful artistic vision.

Fleur in an interview with Ikoness on her work:

The combination and harmony of colors and shapes are important in my work. My work is most of the time optimistic, happy, light. It isn’t sad or depressed work. Even when I’m down, my work is almost never sad. It’s always different because I’m always trying to innovate, to explore new ways, to try different possibilities.

Fleur De Roeck was born in Brasschaat, just outside of Antwerp, but she lived in Visan, in the South of France, from 2005 until 2011, where her fascination with visual expression started at a very young age and even resulted in her first exhibition of her paintings at the age of 18. Subsequently she returned to her country of birth and studied Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Antwerp from which she graduated in 2014, and continues to live and work in the city. Next to the exhibition in Tartine which ran for six month in 2015, her work has been exhibited at Gallerie Nord in Lille, Piet Colaert in Antwerpen, Ladodo Design Gallery in Milano and the September.Lokaal, also in her current hometown Antwerp.

Make sure to follow Fleur de Roeck’s Instagram here

For more information and work see here