How might one characterize Ceulemans’ work? What is special about it? On the one hand, the paintings are delightfully simple because you immediately recognize unusual, isolated, deliberately clumsy or very skilful touches, interventions or additions, which conjure up their own pictorial space because of their mutual relationship and their relationship with the background or with a figurative element. At the same time, the paintings are complex, because in just about every work you can count to five, to seven or to seventeen. The painter Walter Swennen once told me that in a good painting you can always count to three. This is certainly true of many paintings. Seen from that angle, Ceulemans’ works first strike you as having been made by a painter ‘who doesn’t know when to stop’. It is as if he has added more elements than are necessary to arrive at a successful pictorial space. Look carefully, however, and you'll see that while the resulting pictorial space is complex, it is also transparent and light. The paintings are not clogged. They create the illusion of depth. They evoke a sort of ‘stacked up’ space, which might be described as a visual climbing frame.
- Your paintings conjure up a pictorial space by means of fields of colour, stripes and messy brushstrokes, sometimes by means of a figurative element. Some of your strokes remind me of the highlights Joris Ghekiere applies with a brush attached to a drill.
Ceulemans: Yes, I know those highlights. They’re amazing.
- Here, where you would normally expect a highlight, you’ve painted a beige spot. The background is fluorescent vermillion. That’s a nice touch. The highlight is darker than the background: a sort of negative highlight.
Ceulemans: The advantage of fluorescent colours is that the onlooker understands that the painting is not trying to be realistic. I also like to make fluorescent colours vibrate with non-fluorescent colours, so that they change character. Here the result is a sort of Rothko on acid… The work of the painter Pierre Soulages, where light and dark carry equal weight, helped me make and assess the almost white highlight in that fluorescent area, which nevertheless suddenly turns out to be darker than the fluorescent area. Black dominates in Soulages’ work, but the white of the ground is just as important and occasionally even essential. A traditional or academic painter adds the highlights at the end. They are not vestiges of an earlier layer breaking through here and there, but strokes placed so as to illuminate certain areas. I enjoy reversing these things. The idea of ‘negative highlights’, as you call them, amuses and inspires me.
- You make comical stains.
Ceulemans: Sometimes I spend ten minutes working on a small stain. I keep on rubbing, trying to work it into the canvas so that the edges lose their definition and stand out.
- Here you conjure up the image of a field of reeds by means of a whole host of choppy strokes in three different colours.
Ceulemans: I wanted to paint a stretch of grass, but it didn�ft work. I ended up with a field of reeds.
- A virtuoso, illusionistic effect reminiscent of the Impressionists or of Van Gogh. At the same time the brushstrokes are so far apart that from close to they seem to float in a void. It looks as if you put them there to conjure up a dark void. The addition of the white touches shimmering against the brown background evidently gives your canvas depth.
Ceulemans: Those touches also serve as a contrast to the almost mechanical, overworked areas which in the top half of the painting create the image of a building. It�fs a good example of a contrast you can�ft think up in advance. If I try to plan something, the painting goes wrong. I don't plan. I look at the result of a gesture and then I try to counter it.
- The result is often a hollow piling up of minimal gestures, like a stripe created as a crevice between two added layers, which might suggest an architectural element like the corner of a building.
Ceulemans: I love color field painting, but that’s not what I’m aiming at. I try to evoke a space which I paint very flat, allowing the spectator to approach it from different standpoints.
- How do you begin a painting? Do you use gesso?
Ceulemans: I like to apply a first element as something to react to. Sometimes I use acrylics mixed with ink and sometimes coloured gesso, which usually produces a sort of pastel colour. The more dissimilar the ground in terms of colour and texture, the better. Different formats and stretchers of various thicknesses can also help get me started. Acrylics mixed with Indian ink or airbrush ink produce very runny, but highly pigmented paint which I really like working with. The pigment in that ink dissolves much more finely than you could possibly grind or mix it yourself. Unfortunately I can only get small bottles from my supplier now. I sometimes mix those inks with acrylics to give them density. That way I can also apply different strokes and I can work wet in wet.
- In this painting you did use a white ground.
Ceulemans: Yes, but it took me months. The white gives it a sort of freshness.
- How did you make this smudge?
Ceulemans: To make a smudge like that, I go backwards and forwards 500 times with a fairly hard, hog’s bristle brush. There’s often a gradation in it, which I paint with a softer, synthetic brush. These are attempts to paint like someone who can’t paint.
- I have the impression you sometimes lay your paintings down flat to paint them, otherwise there would be many more drips (because you work with very liquid paint).
Ceulemans: You’re right. I often paint on flat canvases. Flat canvases provide a different perspective; you relate differently to the painting. Sometimes you are in for a surprise when you hang the canvas up, but that tension is all part of the process.
- Here you use a flesh colour for an abstract section.
Ceulemans: I don’t think I would use flesh colour to paint people, but it works for a background.
- Why do you so often go for indefinable colours, colours that don’t trigger associations?
Ceulemans: I don’t want to make pure work. I don’t like pure ideas and pure execution. My work sets out to comment on the work itself. So it may come across as too double or too full, but to me that ambiguity is necessary. That’s the way the world appears to me and that’s how I look at the world. The ‘over-fullness’ is intentional.
- How would you describe this colour?
Ceulemans: It’s ochre with a dash of blue ink mixed in so that the ochre turns greenish, bluish. But actually it’s very difficult to define a colour. This area, for example, is painted very opaquely; it is more thickly covered than the other areas. It makes the colour look different. The other thing is that a colour is always influenced by the colours around it and by the way they are applied.
- The edges of your paintings often contain little accents or even essentials.
Ceulemans: Do you go right to the edge, do you stop just before or do you go over it? I want to make these options tangible, not for compositional reasons but to reveal the thinking behind and about a painting.
- I like the obvious vestiges of a bottom layer on the edges of your paintings. At first glance they suggest sloppiness, but then you see that they were applied afterwards, in a rough and humorous sort of way.
Ceulemans: People look first at silhouettes and contours and then at what’s inside a form. They enter the painting from the edge. That’s why it’s nice to have something tremble, explode or burst on the edge.
- They are elements which seem to serve as a sort of bogus starting point for a first, superficial reading of the painting.
Ceulemans: The genesis of a painting is part of its total makeup. It�fs a feature like colour or form. That�fs how I came up with the idea of influencing the overall shape of a painting by giving it a bogus history. I might do this by applying a thick layer of paint to the side of a painting to give the impression of numerous preparatory layers under the surface.
- In this painting you painted over a pink section with a different pink.
Ceulemans: The painting was finished and then the cat walked over it! It was covered in paw marks. She didn�ft walk over it in a felicitous way and so suddenly the painting was dead. After a while I decided to overcome that setback and I corrected the pink part but in such as way that you could see what I had done. The cover-up was executed in a deliberately rough-and-ready way.
The most important question I ask myself is: what is the most unlikely thing I can do on this canvas without resorting to gimmicks? Because I could of course cut the canvas up, but that doesn�ft interest me. How can you make a painting a meta-painting? That�fs what it�fs all about. In a purely figurative painting nothing is left to the spectator�fs imagination. But what would be sufficient motivation to create an abstract painting? You can see that it still needs something, but what? Sometimes you are overcome by despair because you can�ft see any solution. I completed the painting you see here with a calligraphic element. That sort of thing doesn�ft usually work, because the painting starts to revolve around the last gesture. But here it�fs in proportion. It�fs often a question of striking a balance: how can I put a line very clearly on the canvas and yet still have it suggest something?
- By making the line sharp on one side and leaving the other side hazy.
- Here you use the outline of a car as a figurative starting point.
Ceulemans: I studied product development for a year. It�fs a product drawing. The prototype as abstract matter. Here the abstraction is created by the juxtaposition of lines. The lines suggest an unrealistic space. This first dawned on me in 2008.
- You have a tendency to exploit the adventure of each painting to the full.
Ceulemans: How complete do you want to be in a single painting? That�fs a really important question. Only since February of this year have I understood how this can work. I now understand that I don�ft have to pack everything into each work, that collectively my paintings tell a story.
- Would you name a painter whose work you like?
I trained as an illustrator and as such worked for two well-known weeklies. But I stopped… I spent most of the next few years reading: Nietzsche, Montaigne, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Adorno, Horkheimer, Peter Sloterdijk and Guy Debord, who offered an attitude to life rather than a philosophy. I was living near the library in Ghent. I�fm really glad I read so much then, because now I just can�ft do it. I can�ft read and paint at the same time.
- Have you also read novels?
- Like a flesh-coloured background in one of your paintings?
Ceulemans: Indeed. A reversal that is unexpected but leaves a lasting impression. An ambiguous world to walk through.