Vernissage le samedi 17. Mars de 15 – 19h
Durée de l’exposition : 17. Mars – 14. Avril 2018
Une exposition curaté par Pol Le Vaillant

Gust Duchateau – «Steak - Frites», 17 March – 14 April 2018

DuflonRacz Gallery is pleased to present “Steak-Frites”, the gallery’s first exhibition of works by Gust Duchateau. In a suite of paintings derived of photographs or promotional advertisings the artist portrays Brussels and his native Belgium in a careful and poetical manner.

Right from the childhood Duchateau developed an interest for drawing and painting, thus following evening classes at the Beaux-Art de Bruxelles. With seventeen, he must give up his apprenticeship at the “Academie de Saint-Luc” in order to enter quickly a professional career: amongst others as a cartoonist for Bob et Bobbette magazine, as a silkscreen printer for a graphic studio, or the latest as a colourist for Grand Bazar supermarkets. He developed parallel skills into studio practice, his subjects evolving within time, according to his interests, but the approach remaining the same.

Using the techniques of oil painting on several surfaces (canvas, wood, glass, etc) Duchateau works as a meticulous gatherer of material selected from personal and collective memories. He records moments from daily life or events that mark his existence. A rainy Sunday drive in an empty Brussels suburb, a sunset walk with his dog near Place Rogier, or a Cora’s advert where the artist goes shopping. Those are the inspirations for his most outstanding paintings. They are simple and common, yet so much valuable to a sense of inhabiting the fabric of the Belgian city.

Starting from images, then translated into paintings, he tries to faithfully reproduce the imprecise quality of his snapshots shooted with disposable cameras. Nonetheless Duchateau sometimes crops and cut-offs directly his paintings to make them more concise and powerful (occupational hazard, perhaps)

We cannot help but lay our hyper-contemporary eye on such evidence of the banal that we have grown to recognize more and more while the city intensifies and complexifies. Even though Duchateau has no connection to appropriation art, we make the connexion for him in so far that we are concerned with his topics and find it desirable to include his path in the making of our city.

Gust Duchateau was born in 1944 in Mons, lives and works in Brussels.