12.09.2026 – 27.09.2026
Handelsmuseum, Coquilhatstraat 16, 2000 Antwerp
Constellation I – Lyra: Luc Coeckelberghs
Exhibited works
2022/12, 2022 + 2022/29, 2022 + 2022/10, 2022
triptych, acrylics on paper Fabriano
76 x 56 cm each
2022/08, 2022 + 2025/03, 2025 + 2022/14, 2022 + 2021/19, 2021
quadriptych, acrylics on paper Fabriano
76 x 56 cm each
2023/03, 2023 + 2022/25, 2022 + 2023/11, 2023 + 2023/13, 2023 + 2023/10, 2023
pentaptych, acrylics on paper Fabriano
76 x 56 cm each
Lueurs Verticales
Could Luc Coeckelberghs’s painting be an act of resistance, albeit a quiet and modest one, against the barbarism that is advancing dangerously throughout society, and certainly within culture? Years ago, the Italian author Alessandro Baricco sounded the alarm in his much-discussed book I Barbari. Saggio sulla mutazione (The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutation). According to Baricco, the barbarians are systematically developing horizontally, by which he means that they are drawn to everything that moves quickly, remains on the surface and is easy to digest; the internet and social media are therefore their spearheads. Against this, Baricco places verticality, which has always been a defining characteristic of true culture, but which is increasingly under pressure. For him, verticality signifies depth, time, patience and craftsmanship. These are precisely the characteristics of Luc Coeckelberghs’s artistic practice. He is a companion to Baricco.
It is therefore no coincidence that, particularly in his work of recent years, a vertical movement is so explicitly present. Fragile strips of colour glide upwards across a white ground. It is as though another white veil passes over them, erasing all that is incidental before our eyes and leaving only the essential. As a result, a mental space opens up within the pictorial field, behind the strips, for the attentive observer: an undefined and seemingly endless space. This is the space in which the artist himself also likes to dwell, and into which he gently invites us to enter. The scale of the paintings reinforces this invitation. They are two metres high and begin just above the floor. In this way, they function almost as an entrance, offering the viewer the possibility of moving from a physical experience towards a contemplative one. Coeckelberghs’s work is sometimes associated with minimalism, but wrongly so. While both share an intention towards simplification, minimalism is more cerebral, whereas his art exerts a visual attraction and seduces us to touch, engage and become part of it.
Time is needed to penetrate a Coeckelberghs painting. Each of his works possesses depth, not only in a spiritual sense but also materially. The spiritual dimension emerges from the subtle and personal way in which he handles his materials. Patiently, he builds up fine layers of diluted acrylic paint. He has a clear preference for certain colours: blue, purple, red, green and, surprisingly, silver. Each layer is carefully glazed. The colours gradually intermingle with one another and with white until they reach a point of saturation. Is this the moment when the material ceases to evolve and seems to evaporate? Sometimes the artist needs more than twenty layers to reach this magical point. Such a painting is therefore a work of long duration, a form of monastic labour.
Yet the layering does not make the painting heavy; on the contrary. It gives the work an extraordinary transparency, as though light were shining through it. This creates an almost sacred atmosphere, reminiscent of the way light enters a church. Not the exuberant light of Gothic architecture, but the more restrained light of a Romanesque abbey church, which is gentle on the eye and encourages contemplation. Throughout his career, the artist has also worked with light in ways other than through painting alone. At one point, for example, he constructed two walls and a floor in Brussels’ Flagey building entirely from sugar cubes, allowing daylight to shimmer through their crystals, producing a distinctly immaterial result. In another project, he transformed the interior of a large container through computer-controlled LED lighting, filling it with an infinite number of colour variations that deserve to be called ‘light paintings’. Coeckelberghs has never shied away from investigating and experimenting with materials and forms beyond traditional painting in order to discover new visual possibilities. Yet whatever he creates, with paint and brush, with light or other media, it has always been purely and completely abstract, without the slightest concession.
The artist does not need inspiration from his own emotions, nor from elements in his surroundings such as nature or landscape. His abstraction arises exclusively from the phenomenon of painting itself and from the material possibilities inherent to it. The result is an image that manifests painting in its essence. He immediately searches for ways to transcend it.
As early as 1978, when he had only recently graduated and was staying in Rome on a scholarship, he wrote a manifesto in which he emphasised that painting, for him, was inseparably connected to an awareness of space: “Through my work I try to intensify a physical experience of space. This physical experience is accompanied by a mental experience, a mental space.” Throughout his oeuvre, he has given form to the relationship with space in many different ways. On numerous occasions, he has had the opportunity to create large-scale pictorial installations, either inside a gallery or outdoors in a landscape, entirely adapted to their context. His particular approach consisted of humanising immeasurable space by introducing series of small, coloured objects into it. In these installations, space itself became the carrier of the image, just as a canvas is the carrier of a painting. He has also experimented with sculpture, again from a painterly perspective: covering wooden constructions with torn sheets of asphalt. The question he has been grappling with for so long is therefore how the two-dimensional can enter into a true fusion with the three-dimensional; in other words, how he can work fully in space with pictorial elements such as painted canvases. Among other things, he has therefore combined paintings into a kind of bas-relief and attached paintings to one another to create sculptures. On one occasion, for example, he placed fifteen life-sized paintings upright and facing in different directions within a room, elevating their raw backsides to the same status as their painted fronts.
If one were to map his successive exhibitions through the relationship between painting and space, one would see a pendulum movement from painting and drawing to object, then to installation, and all the way back again. In recent years, his focus has once more shifted towards an investigation of the flat surface as such, in the form of vertical gestures on large canvases. Yet these too have an effect on the surrounding space. The quiet presence of several related paintings, and the light that emanates from them, their soft lueurs, create an intimate and serene atmosphere.
This text was translated. Originally written in Dutch by Etienne Van den Bergh, 2023.
Discover the other participating artists:
Ben Van den Broeck
Bernard Villers
Deveny Faruque
Doi Collective
Elise Brichot
Eva Pel
Lily van der Stokker
Luc Coeckelbergs
Niels Poiz
Zanne Jeghers
Zena Van den Block