Karel Dierickx was a painter who taught at KASK in Ghent, where he inspired Philippe Vandenberg, Marc Maet, Jan Van Imschoot and Ingrid Castelein, amongst others. He was a classical artist in the truest sense of the word. His oeuvre is linked to late 19th-century traditions and reflects on the pivotal moment when modernism, then at its peak, veered towards conceptualism. Dierickx’s imagination was rooted in the fundamental crisis of looking, as epitomised by the work of Cézanne and Bonnard. The importance the artist attached to ‘painting itself’ was a constant. Dierickx usually departed from a vague idea or sketch and developed his themes through free and subjective painting style. Through rich tonalism and an invariably self-correcting technique, figuration became elusive in his works. Dierickx’s paintings are sometimes difficult to read. The artist continued to focus systematically and intuitively on the dialectic of appearance and disappearance. Through traditional genres – landscape, portrait and still life – he explored anew the possibilities of historical and contemporary painting. Motifs surfaced, but also seemed to merge, each time afresh, into an interplay of colour, dynamism and composition. His paintings often seem to take shape before one’s very eyes.
In the early 1970s, Dierickx painted landscapes and still lifes using fine brushstrokes. Vessels, vases and fruits, amongst other things, are eminently recognisable in his luminous canvases in light and soft tones, although they can also seem to dissolve into a hazy space. Dierickx’s style changed in the early 1980s and he began to create large-scale, abstract works. He painted wedge- and arc-shaped signs, devoid of any concrete references to reality, on dirty-coloured backgrounds using violent brushstrokes. These primal, semi-autonomous symbols lend a universal dimension to his work. He also painted copacted, rough, black-and-white shapes on coloured grounds. Dierickx exhibited these works in the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The artist returned to concrete subjects in the 1990s: portraits, landscapes, still lifes or studio scenes. Figures loom into view but also merge with the background, as they also do in the work of Jean Fautrier or Eugène Leroy, for example. The canvases exude fragility and transience. Dierickx poured his complex emotions into intimate, cerebral paintings: while some are dark and sombre, others offer a glimmer of hope. From the late 1990s onwards, he sculpted several works in bronze: heads, figures and birds. These can be read as spatial equivalents of his canvases. Drawing also grew in significance within his oeuvre. The artist experimented endlessly with pencil, ink, gouache, pastel, watercolour, charcoal, chalk and even coffee. Lines and stains challenge our imagination in such works.
In 2015, the Raveel Museum in Machelen-aan-de-Leie paid tribute to the painter’s oeuvre with the solo exhibition Voorstelbare werkelijkheid [Conceivable Reality], following the artist’s death in 2014. The museum highlighted the multifaceted and timeless nature of Dierickx’s work as an antidote to the fleeting trends in contemporary art.
