Nel Aerts
Nel Aerts lives and works in Antwerp. She makes drawings, paintings and collages, in a playful and colourful style, in which diverging traces can be recognised from a rich tradition in the art of painting. She uses an abstract play of lines, which is penetrated in a radical manner by Cubist figures, round forms or even surfaces of colour. Her work is never artificial or far-fetched; these are direct pictures, sometimes figurative, containing a simple, innocent pictorial language that breathes a large degree of freedom.
Nel Aerts paints without complexes, almost like a spontaneous experiment, for extracting as much individuality as possible from her paint and imagination. With her brushes, she almost carelessly creates impressions of kings, pub visitors, slender female bodies or decorative wallpaper. However busy or cut up they may sometimes be, her scenes always radiate a certain peace, like a picture from a movie that is momentarily put on hold and is then fixed as a stubbornly strong Gestalt. The same is true for her drawings. She can turn the word "nothing" into something on the canvas.
Her self-portraits, on the other hand, have both a cartoonish and a tragic quality. She poses uneasily in our own small world, even if we do not know what is pose and what is real. In a recent work she uses more and more textiles, with which he makes collages that allow her to replace the classic texture of oil on canvas with a new medium.