Page 58 - Studio International - May 1973

Art, he began to represent the objects as
advertised objects in a commercial catalogue.
Degobert holds that quite accidentally
relationships develop among the objects. His
works can be exhibited along with Pop Art works,
but also the hyperrealistic ones. The isolated
object is most important with him. It does not
appear in its vulgarity, but separated and
improved. 'I have learned a great deal from the
people who retouch photographs. They work at
the photograph, embellish it and create a myth.
The ale with the lightest froth'. These are
manipulations which he also practises in art and
the resulting objects have a splendour of their
own. Degobert's works have no bearing on the
objects represented but on the mechanism of
seduction used in advertising.
Marcel Maeyer (born 1920) turned to realism
in 1971. He prefers strongly structured themes
and objects in particular. He uses photographs,
but his realism has nothing to do with analysis of
our perception or of photographic reality. The
artist is firstly interested in the projection of a
structure on the occasion of the approach to
visual reality, so that both elements interact in
the process of painting. The formal aspect of
the objects, the concrete character of the colour,
the role of the blank canvas both as material and
as colour, are so important that they quieten
down the obtrusiveness of the real object.
Roger Wittevrongel (born 1933) also makes
use of the photograph. No more than Maeyer,
however, does he analyse the photographic
reality of our perception. With him the object in
itself is not predominantly important.
Wittevrongel likes a certain complexity, of
relations between objects and their
surroundings, of objects which have been
changed by time, or are in a state of decay, and
which fascinate him by their unexpected shapes
and colours. There is a classical strain in this
artist. He has a rigorous drawing technique, a
care for the form which subordinates the colour.
He purges the data and represents them coolly.
Reality disappears behind an abstract screen.
This transcription avoids every systematic
composition or any relation from which, for
example, a surrealistic affinity could spring.
with its many abstract elements : the green field, Hence Wittevrongel, like Maeyer, resists the
(Top left)
Guy Degobert the white lines, the goal-post, the net, the corner Magrittian temptation. The unusual in their
Bottles 1973 flag. A tent is also one of his favourite subjects. work is what can be found in daily reality.
(Top right) The green picture with its white lines has At a time when care for the environment is
Marcel Maeyer something of land-art, whereas the simple forms very intense, the artists' interest in every-day
Postbox 1973
seem to go back to minimal art. reality, transposed in a matter-of-fact style
(Above) The latest realist trends are best illustrated by without either subjective effusion or critical
Roger Wittevrongel distortion, is not necessarily a regression.
Drawing 1973 the works of Guy Degobert, and by those of
Marcel Maeyer and Roger Wittevrongel. The Beervelde School members and the New
In March-April thirteen 'realist' artists were Realist artists renounce expressionistic art.
exhibited at the Darmstadt Kunsthalle. The They differ in the extent to which they appeal
exhibition was entitled 'Breschen zur to the imagination.
Wirklichkeit. Belgische Kunst Heute' (`Openings Since Elias and Roobjee the 'Ghent
to Reality. Belgian Art Today'). This title made Primitives' have now come to the fore. With
it possible to include Expressionism as well as them another common characteristic of the
poetic realism, besides the works of the artists above mentioned artists can be noticed: the joy
mentioned above. derived from the very act of painting, the
Guy Degobert (born 1914) was a commercial rediscovery of traditional materials, and the
artist when in 1966, under the influence of Pop fascination of the white canvas. q
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