Michaël Borremans is one of Belgium’s most important artists today. In his paintings, drawings and films, he immerses us in the difficult to grasp beauty of strange-versus-familiar situations that are essentially illogical. The characters present in his work are trapped in an indeterminate time and space. Oblivion or institutional suppression seems to be their lot. The radical preference for inexplicable alienation and confusing beauty makes Borremans relevant in international contemporary figurative painting, in which the desire for strictly defined semiotics and conceptualization still prevails.
