Veerle Beckers (1976, Belgium) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.
Despite its immediacy, Beckers’s work is not photographic. It doesn’t want to ‘tie things down’ irrefutably. Beckers’s brush technique is not used to create a meticulously realistic account of things. Consciously not, for Beckers has all the technical skill to do so if she wishes. The abstraction in her work, its fundamental two-dimensional nature, her quest for clear often recognisable or even universal forms or figures: it all seems to be rooted in a deeper wish to develop a simple understandable language. Her own language, a language that has the right to exist alongside the many other languages in the art of painting that Beckers so fluently masters. And that language springs from a wonderful combination of abstracting gaze and one of extreme closeness. The former isolates things from their normal surroundings and tries to pare them down to their essence. The latter tries to make their fragile specificity even more tangible.
(Birgit Cleppe, 2020 | translated by Peter Flynn)