Artifact New York

 

Luc Standaert’s paintings come out at you, frenzied. They pummel you, cajole you, and over time something haunting, even unsettling permeates the work. This is the result of the artist’s highly sophisticated pictorial intelligence, which recognizes the value of indicating spatio-temporal involution.

The artist’s overall ideological ambition is to frame political and philosophical issues which compel him. These are set within an order of the mind intent on circulating questions around the designations of sameness and difference, separateness and integratedness, volition and the involuntary, destiny and fate. The artist is compelled by the presence of emerging energy; his intention is to bring into visual play visual analogies that refer to the affects of causality, as well as to the condition of dependence / interdependence / independence and to human agency itself. This is a tough work, as it seems to be intent in depicting interior frames of mind. It welcomes uncertainty and approves of unpredictability.

Standaert’s works, such as Human Factor, Identity, Fata Morgana, Determination, seem to suggest that there is a supra-mundane world that not only co-exists with the world of empiricism and intellectualisms but also is bound within the groundedness of reality. His vision asserts that there is a continuum of thought-perception which validates and nullifies the condition of what might be called “the sensory givens” of physiological and somatic existence. There seems to be on the part of the artist a desire to suggest the condition of subjectivity and objectivity held in balance.

Were we to permit ourselves the challenge of characterizing the complex quality of Standaert’s art, we might say that its incongruous facets arise out of a struggle to make manifest an ‘inner realism’ only available to the artist. It arises out of a world that only the artist is capable of identifying and tracing. Standaert is engaged in seeking in art a satisfaction for man’s search for order. In outlining that world’s contours to the observer his "logic of passion" gives moral authority and remarkable subversive importance to the artist’s task of unveiling the marvelous.

 

John Austin,

Manhattan art critic

 

 

Artefuse New York

 

Belgian artist Luc Standaert presented three distinctly themed paintings bordering on the surreal and pseudo-realistic. There is an exploration of perception, social commentary, pop art and complex ideas. The soothing blue color in the background somehow tied the trio showcased that night.

 

Oscar Laluyan,

New York art critic