Tom Van Puyveld
Tom Van Puyvelde (born 1985 in Temse, Belgium) lives and works in Temse, Belgium.
Self-determination as the spontaneous result of an evolutionary practice seems to be the pivotal line, in turn involuntary, which, like a reptile organism, runs through the artistic research of the young Belgian artist Tom Van Puyvelde. Moreover, this undulating and never upright movement emphasizes the rejection of definitions and classifications, rather it is devoted to the incessant discovery dictated by the brushstroke and the complex expressive variety bestowed by the pictorial material. A spectrum is revealed in all its polychromy, however, the multiple is not determined by a clear difference in the offered coloring but by a painstaking and almost visceral work on gradation. In this sense, the title of the work itself acquires the most original sense of the word because etymologically “spectrum” indicates the instrument thanks to which it is possible to "look". Here the real looking becomes subtle and acute, here the liminal visual apophony becomes the protagonist through an aesthetic result that puts everything into question where the continuity of gradation is divided and inverted and the difference between physical and digital becomes subtle and turbulent thanks to the gesture that becomes increasingly refined and rarefied. Every pictorial act is autarchic and democratic at the same time. The abstract-figurative binomial is not only questioned but the dialectic becomes ferocious to the point of annihilation, the two opposites lose each other's consistency in a movement of tension that attracts them to each other, in which the visual stratification indefinitely permeates the vortex thus obtained. The oeuvre exhibited in an atmosphere that the artist himself defines as his own or already familiar to the oeuvre itself, an environment congenital to the birth of the spectrum, sanctions a fundamental step in Tom Van Puyvelde's artistic research as it pushes to the extreme the questioning of any rigid visual encasement while offering an idyllic whirlpool of calm.
His paintings are included in several international private collections in Taipei, Sydney, Berlin, Ibiza, Greece and the UK.