Lode MATTHIJS (1915-1995): The hunter and the wolves

Painter. Training at the School of Decorative Arts in Anderlecht, was advised by Jos Albert and Félix De Boeck, but largely self-taught. Young Art Award in 1945 and 1946. Evolves from Impressionism through sober abstraction (1960-1965) to a very synthetic expressionist style. It is similar to the intimacy of Brabant fawns, but even more so to the great symbolist lineage of Gauguin, the Nabis and the Pont-Aven school, both for the psychological resonance of his collected figuration and for the expressive simplification of forms, built on the use of colourful and unrealistic flats. In the natural shows of this Ardèche so familiar to Matthijs, as in the Breton scenes of the artists of Pont-Aven, memory notations, transcribed using decorative arabesques and expressive schematisations, are enough to create formal equivalents impregnated with a high poetic charge thanks to the power of the colour that the artist processes by composing his palette on the opposition between warm and cold tones, tuning pure colours to broken tones. Great was the astonishment of the painter's admirers and critics when in 1962 he exhibited compositions of abstract inspiration and lyrical tendency of paintings of a soft internalised geometry, with felted tones dominated by blues, but also wood assemblages such as practised at the time by a Vic Gentils or a Louise Nevelson. Around 1965, however, he returned to figuration. Around 1975, the painter raised his palette and transposed the game of appearances into saturated colour chords. Under the effect of psychological pressures, the forms undergo in him distortions of an expressionist nature. Despite the intimate tone that commanded all his pictorial production, Despite the intimate tone that commanded all his pictorial production, he always instilled in his works a diffuse feeling of anguish, a kind of torment.