Agnes Maes (1942–2016, Belgium) occupies a singular place in the Flemish painting tradition. Her work moves between figuration and abstraction with a deeply sensual command of colour, light, and brushstroke. Trained by Roger Raveel, her work bears a certain affinity with that of Raoul De Keyser, with whom she was in regular dialogue. She developed a visual language distinctly her own: at once intimate and expansive, grounded in observation yet always tending toward painterly autonomy.
Architecture runs through the work as a way of thinking about space, presence, and absence. Maes painted floor plans of the Cistercian abbey of Sénanque, fragments of Palladio, structures by Le Corbusier and Gaudí — and, with the same attention, the monumental forms hidden inside a torn-open cardboard box. Koen Van Synghel related this spatial imagination to Piranesi: isolated elements and fragmentary architectural impressions that compel the viewer to reconstruct space through the act of looking. In Maes' paintings, architecture sheds its weight and statics; rooms tilt, light detaches from its source, and the distinction between inside and outside gives way to a free, floating spatiality.
Light is perhaps the most persistent presence in the oeuvre. Gold — applied as leaf on sculptures and as pigment on canvas — lost all materiality in her hands and became a figure for the ungraspable. Her surfaces range from a milky, self-emanating glow to the absorptive darkness of caput mortuum, pushed deep into unprimed canvas. Karel Geirlandt captured this duality in a single phrase: "Expressionism, without emotionality."
From 1986 onward, Latin words and numerals entered the paintings — Esse, Memoria, Ecce Homo, Frontière — applied in stencil letters, the everyday set against the timeless. The dimensions of the canvas were painted onto its surface, confining the concept of Being to the material limits of the stretcher. Fragments of Petrarch appear across the work, most notably the verse Solo e pensoso, whose meditation on solitude and the unmeasurable resonates deeply with Maes' own concerns.
One of her most recognisable devices is the painted screen: a translucent veil laid over carefully resolved passages, simultaneously concealing and drawing the eye. She would paint these veils over the strongest passages on the canvas, testing the viewer's willingness to look further. A devoted admirer of Matisse — whose chromatic intensity reverberates throughout her oeuvre — she wove echoes of Vuillard, Bonnard, and Morandi into her compositions, absorbing art history as living material.
In her final decade, a confrontation with illness and death in her immediate surroundings led to the series Le ballet des cellules, in which microscopic images of viruses, brain tissue, and cell divisions became the starting point for paintings of striking warmth. As Jeroen Laureyns observed, where most abstract painting cultivates scepticism and distance, Maes brought a rare tenderness to her images — making the biomedical visible as something soft, alive, and deeply human. Edith Doove, writing in De Standaard, called her work "grievously underrecognised." Bert Popelier put it more simply: "Agnes Maes is a master."
Her work is held in numerous public and institutional collections, including Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), Musée d'Ixelles (Brussels), Mudel (Deinze), the Collection of the Federal State, the Collection of the Flemish Community, Collection Nationale Bank, Collection DEXIA, The Peter Stuyvesant Collection, and Collection Centraal Beheer (Apeldoorn).