Michiel Ceulers - Statements

Just as I consider my writing to be, first and foremost, always about writing itself, so I came to understand Ceulers' work as one long exploration of the possibilities of painting itself and a playful excavation of its tradition. If our artistic practices are in any way comparable — and we have plenty conversations on this topic — it might be in the way they are both deeply buried in their respective intertextualities. These paintings never exist in a vacuum. Motifs and gestures are generously borrowed from predecessors, dead or alive, because what is crucial is not the individual painting but furthering the conversation at the heart of the craft. Pictorial emblems accumulate meaning throughout the years. The painted bird is now no longer the same one as when it was painted ten years ago. History needs to be repeated, ironically, sincerely, as tragedy, as farce, to find out what its significance might be. With every new painting one has the possibility of changing everything that came before. We need distance to see. As such Ceulers' work is very much modern in the way Baudelaire defined it. As a continuation of their tradition the paintings safeguard the so-called eternal and immovable that is at stake here, but at the same time they also adhere to the other side of modernity; the transient, the fleeting and the contingent. This is perhaps most directly visible in the way Ceulers names his works.

Michaël Van Remoortere