Mil Ceulemans

de Thibaut Verhoeven, Gregory Ball

Roberto Polo Gallery proudly presents 'Silent treatment', a major solo exhibition of recent mixed media paintings on canvas by Mil Ceulemans, a Belgian painter born in 1977, who lives and works in Antwerp. We may see Mil Ceulemans' painting as purely 'fundamental' (in Dutch fundamentele schilderkunst), the scientific and technical analysis of the interaction between the elementary principles of painting. However, it is also highly intuitive and hyper-sensitive, reconciling the seemingly paradoxical formal and informal aspects of painting. As the title of his exhibition, 'Silent treatment', may imply, Mil Ceulemans is an impatient painter inquest of pictorial conflict and collision with his persona. His creative process is experimental, one of trial and error over time, of constantly adding, effacing and removing paint from the canvas until it assumes a history of its own. In his search for the providential error, Mil Ceulemans provokes deliberate painterly accidents, often the consequence of inter-active media, such as oil, acrylic and spray paint, as well as ink and lacquer, applied with unorthodox painting utensils, such as a squeegees, scrapers and spray cans. He mistrusts paint brushes, because their strokes are too virtuous and predictable for his rapid, sensory and nervous vision. Mil Ceulemans does not possess the restful gaze of a man before a seascape, but rather, the anxious one of a man lost in the urban jungle with a gun devoid of bullets. He gives these 'accidents' a form which corresponds to his serendipitous perception of the world, driven by his visceral need to paint, as well as his desire to transcend formal and informal limitations, order and chaos. Under the guise of a rational structure, Mil Ceulemans sows anarchy. Exhibition: Roberto Polo Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (07.11.2013-12.01.2014).