Matthieu Ronsse

After the exhibition, the Raveel Museum decided, in consultation with Matthieu Ronsse, to keep his impressive mural, although this total work of art was regarded as a temporary intervention.

From March 8 to June 14, 2020, the Roger Raveel Museum organized the exhibition Murals. This project highlighted the specific in situ painting that Roger Raveel also experimented with. The best example are the famous murals in the Castle of Beervelde, the restoration of which was completed at the end of 2020 and will be open to the public again from 2021. Six contemporary artists were invited to work at the Raveel Museum in a similar way: Jana Cordenier, Koen van den Broek, Sophie Whettnall, Tatjana Gerhard, Carole Vanderlinden and Matthieu Ronsse. The works of the six artists were shown in various exhibition rooms of the old presbytery house.

The paintings of Matthieu Ronsse (1981) are products of a process-based and physical action. In an ever evolving and completely unpredictable experiment, construction and destruction alternate. The artist creates the impetus for an image, then (partially) covers it, tears it open, pastes it over or completely destroys it and then ruminates it and combines it into new connections. The eclectic cacophony that arises is a complex play of layers and associations and comes to full maturity in a total installation. Ronsse tries to oppose formal or conceptual conventions within his own oeuvre. The art-historical references function as motives rather than conscious formalistic quotations. We recognize subtle nods to Rembrandt's character heads looming out of the dark, Cézanne's abstract experiments, Lucian Freud's fleshy nudes or Velázquez's monumental horses.

In the Raveel Museum, Ronsse gives a new dimension to the concept of the mural: his in situ intervention extended to the full width and height of the four walls in the space, including the door, the mantelpiece and the plinths. The echoes of the improvised studio he set up on the spot testify to the freedom of creation in anexploded laboratory full of oil paint.