Mathieu Verhaeghe
Before Mathieu Verhaeghe (1986) studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, he earned a Master of Philosophy from the University of Antwerp.
‘I initially wound up in philosophy, with the existentialists, structuralism, Sartre, Heidegger, and Foucault. I have more of a writer’s profile, but I never became one. I am also my work’s public–’ and, he remarks apologetically, ‘as an artist, I occasionally slip through the cracks leaving me not terribly well known. When I was younger, I always took art lessons. I wanted to become a cartoonist.’
At the Royal Academy, he chose painting and discovered he had an aptitude and passion for classical and figurative painting. Once in the bachelor’s third year, students are expected to expand their horizons. They can contemplate what interests them, for instance, how the painter’s second brushstroke on the canvas invariably catapults them into the history of painting and how this impasse can be circumvented, beaten, or embraced.
‘Yeah, that was the last year of my Royal Academy studies. Gradually, I noticed that painting like that started to feel like pulling teeth, and I really wanted out...out of the process of painting. I arrived at the Royal Academy with a fairly naive idea of what art is. And I’d picked painting because, like many, I felt powerfully drawn to classical, figurative paintings. But once you’re in an academy, you come across teachers who show you things that attempt to break that mould; you learn art history, and that also confronts you with all kinds of stuff... Obviously, painting has an incredibly rich tradition, and those who want to paint carry it on; however, that tradition can also become a kind of dead weight. I hit a point where I was no longer really sure what I wanted to do with the whole art thing.’
Verhaeghe noticed his work increasingly centred on himself and his struggle to paint. The glimmer of a solution came to him from behind the curtains of domestic life, the families and everyday objects that are part of it, and the images of which embed themselves somewhere inside, making a home there. After his parents’ divorce, young Verhaeghe lived with his father, who was a good deal older than the fathers of his peers. ‘He’ll kick the bucket soon’, the young Verhaeghe concluded.
At the academy, he started working on a portrait of his father, clothed only in pants and looking away from the painter (or viewer) in profile, as though the old man stood profile in the painter’s studio staring outside or at a wall. He’d just been discharged from the hospital for a hernia and had an ugly scar on his belly. The size of the painting is close to the true size. The illusion of the old man right in front of you is only marred by him either having been shrunk by the painter or being placed further into the room. This game of distance versus proximity, accessibility versus inaccessibility, reveals a painter who has meticulously studied the classical painting of, say, Vermeer and carefully poured himself and his current passions into the details without breaking the secrecy shrouding the canvas. Ultimately, you’re sucked into an illusion where the old man in the portrait actually comes to life before your eyes, naked but for his pants, and you can hear what he’s thinking when really those thoughts are your own. Verhaeghe took a picture of himself in his pants in the same pose and admitted he was mainly looking for an experience.
Its translation into portraiture and oil painting revealed the medium’s ability to portray decay and mortality.
‘I painted another dead rabbit after that’, he notes with deadpan face. ‘The intensity that went into that portrait was gone. ‘I started painting without that undercurrent of feeling. My work also increasingly centred on me and my painting struggles’, says Verhaeghe while showing me his Afstand/Timing/Precisie (2015) piece: baby blue pyjamas made of Nicky velours (reminiscent of the terry clothé shorts worn by children in the 1970s and 1980s), with three flags in primary colours on the chest, and a painted urine stain on the crotch of the trousers. Hung from a hangar, the pyjamas recall a childhood both happy-go-lucky and dysfunctionally (bed-wetting) terrifying. ‘Nirvana’s Smells like teen spirit mostly makes me think of the chorus line “Here we are now, entertain us”, but that could just be my fondness for wetting the bed.’
Verhaeghe distanced himself from painting, only keeping one hand in the game. He began a series of works abstracted and disconnected from the biographical, which continued to build on the analogy between paint and skin, ageing, intimacy, the drying process of paint, crackling, and still life as a physical sculpture, which can embody humour and melancholy simultaneously.
Initially a middle finger to painting, Verhaeghe’s paint sausage sculptures acquired a life of their own as a series and were included in MHKA’s Amberes – Roberto Bolãnois Antwerp (2019) group exhibition. Later, they were acquired as part of the city collection (Sausage Series Installation). After the first pieces, Verhaeghe continued pumping pig intestines full of paint, first acrylics followed by oils, which would leak out of the sausage after two to three months of drying. The drying process and final result were unpredictable, something he couldn’t control; the sausages curved over, wrinkled, and serendipitously aligned with some of the artist’s themes, who –according to him – ‘somehow just kept making paint sausages’.
‘I said to myself some six months ago that it was time for the sausages to stop, but now I’ve got to keep shoving them down my gullet.’
It began with a childhood memory, his father slicing a dry sausage on a cutting board at his sister’s place in Spain. But while he was going for something more intimate, something smaller, believing that he’d hit on something analogous to human desiccation, the paint sausage sculptures took on a life of their own, bridging the gap between the adjectives, repulsive, grotesque, pathetically authentic, resentful, foolish and, for some, even sexual and macho. All that sprang from a simple memory: the smell and image of a dry sausage, reliving the experience of Spain.
‘For the Rubens Castle exhibition, I had a more spatial approach. I arranged them on drying racks, like the ones I saw on the Ostend dyke. They also had those wooden racks there, or like the smoked sausages you see at the butcher’s.’
Rack III Rubens Red is a drying rack full of red paint sausages, alluding to the serial production of the baroque master’s studio. Rubens’ prolific works relied on the aid of a battery of assistants. The theme of mortality infiltrates the work anew through his use of red pigment – vermilion. Over time, the pigment oxidises and turns black (with white splotches); experts fail to halt this process of mortality, only succeeding at slowing it down. And there seems to be a direct link with Pop Art, given Verhaeghe’s own words: ‘I’m caught in an anachronism. Now, there’s a tree full of convenient, bite-size paintings to hang over the sofa. My art is exactly what a 1960s artist would produce...That kind of art is over, but it’s not hard to plug back into.’, he adds. ‘But before long, it starts to feel hollow, and that makes me feel rotten. Do I have to whore myself out? It really is up to me.’
Even though his studio kind of resembles a tiny sausage factory, those sausages have given him back the will to paint. They’re used as colour keys, cartoonish objects or jamming devices in his spatial work, where the boyhood dream of becoming a cartoonist is palpable. That multimedia element was also present in earlier installations and collages, e.g. Feestvarken II (at the table), where a ham hangs drying from a long party pennant, or Sisyphus (2015), a canvas Verhaeghe ropes to himself during a masterclass at an old industrial site, dragging it around with him for a week. ‘Painting can be a drag’, was the motto back then. The point was to make something more real than a painting. This seems like a pretty taxing, ambitious chore for an artwork to achieve, but in the trying, humour turns out to be the solution. For example, the 3D still life installation is doing its level best to be more real than the painting.
During a residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum, he printed cotton sausages on landscape prints from old encyclopaedias; there, the different (escape) routes, media, and approaches seem to converge.