Mathieu Leenaert

Aerosol on canvas

Born in 1983, Mathieu Leenaert lives and works in Knokke-Heist. Born and raised in the Flemish countryside, he developed an early taste for byways and singular trajectories.

After studying economics in Bruges, he pursued a demanding intellectual path, turning to the philosophy of art and aesthetics at the University of Helsinki, before obtaining a master's degree in philosophy at Ghent University. This training deeply nourishes an artistic practice conceived as a space for reflection as much as experimentation.

At the same time, he developed his own personal artistic research, exploring a wide variety of mediums, from spray paint and ink to needlework. This quest for limits, both social and formal, led him to practice tattooing for several years, first on the move, then from a private studio on the Belgian coast.

For almost two decades, Mathieu Leenaert has refined a rigorous visual language based on monochrome, realistic and geometric compositions. But faced with the gradual recuperation of a once marginal culture by the mainstream, he initiated a radical break. This tension gave rise to a veritable artistic renaissance.

With no formal training in the visual arts, he returned to spray painting in an instinctive, free and liberated gesture. Reacting to an age saturated with digital images and simulacra, he opts for purity.

His large, meditative canvases, constructed from subtle gradations, open up spaces of silence and suspension. Through what he describes as "radical abstraction" - the refusal of all figuration and narrative, and the deliberate absence of titles - he offers a direct, almost physical experience of color and light.

Far from any imposed reading, his work invites us to slow down, to feel, to confront a pure presence. It's a counter-current approach, opposed to the immediacy and over-interpretation of our times.

His artistic practice thus embodies a plastic translation of his philosophical convictions, inspired in particular by the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, concepts inherited from Friedrich Nietzsche, in a quest for balance between order and chaos, mastery and abandonment.