Robert Devriendt
Peintures & Scénarios

Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens regularly invites contemporary artists to present their work in dialogue with the permanent collection.

This summer, Robert Devriendt exhibits eight ‘sequences’, engaging in a dialogue with works from the museum collection. A sequence is a series of mini-paintings that function as film fragments. One might suspect a connection between the paintings or even the development of a storyline. However, Robert Devriendt always leaves enough room for interpretation by the viewer and never imposes a definitive explanation of a sequence.

The subjects of the paintings have diverse origins. Some are staged with models in the studio, while others are images from magazines or self-taken photos. The work itself is painted in a meticulous and hyperrealistic manner. Yet, it is far from the photorealism of the 1970s, as Robert Devriendt suggests much more than he depicts. He imbues the images with indefinable emotions related to melancholy, loneliness, seduction, perversion, and more. Thus, Robert Devriendt’s work poses a fundamental challenge to our imagination.

For the Peintures & Scénarios project, Robert Devriendt invited seven authors to write a text or scenario for a sequence. The texts by Saskia De Coster, Annelies Verbeke, Koen Peeters, Bernard Dewulf, Céline Luchet, Peter Verhelst, Oscar van den Boogaard, Catherine Laubier, and Yves Brochard were compiled with the sequences into a publication.

The exhibition Peintures & Scénarios was previously presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing.