The French painter André Derain, one of the leading figures of Fauvism, once said of the movement: “For us colours were sticks of dynamite”. A line that the Belgian artist Pol Ledent signs off on with his artworks, landscapes that explode in a fantastic range of colour, soaking the hills and woods of the Walloon province of Namur.
Self-taught, he found the watercolour of his early days too limited for the vivid tones that, once he moved to oil, took hold in his work. Pol Ledent paints scenes from nature, sometimes more figurative, sometimes more abstract, with a gut-level force that recalls the fauves, the early Matisse, both for his provocative and, we could say, psychotropic palette, and for the way he uses black strokes to define contours. And as with the fauves, there is a Japanese influence in his work: light barely tempered by shadow and the presence of calligraphy in some of his exotic portraits.
In this artist's output you can spot compositions with an Art Nouveau air, like small still lifes but showing lively flowerbeds full of wild flowers: lilacs, poppies, bellflowers... Winter and its shifts in light and landscape turn into an earthy but equally rich palette. He combines ochres, greys and snowy whites with the drama of the black strokes, which in these winter scenes bring to mind the German Romantics, held captive by the rural landscapes and black forests that are also found in the Wallonia region Ledent sings to.
Visit Pol Ledent's gallery at pledent.artelista.com/es/
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