© Jan Verlinde Photography
Ellen Vrijsen (BE, 1979) is a contemporary Belgian artist whose work has pursued the intriguing space between the generic terms of figuration and abstraction. Her paintings and drawings are an ongoing aesthetic dispute between planes of colour, volumes and figures. Originally trained in Illustrative Design at Sint-Lucas Antwerp, she initially gained recognition as an illustrator. Her career reached a significant milestone in 2011 when she was awarded the prestigious Boekenpauw for her debut picture book, Cantecleir.
As her practice evolved, Vrijsen’s focus has shifted toward painting and drawing, though her roots in storytelling remain evident. Her practice is deeply informed by themes of memory, emotion, and perception. Her paintings engage the viewer with figures presented “sous rature” – subtly “erased”- and with inward-looking gazes. They are characters that seem to observe the viewer just as much as they are being observed, creating a sense of both intimacy and distance.
Throughout the years, Vrijsen’s artistic process has been defined by transparency and experimentation—a philosophy she captures in the core principle and body of work, ‘Trust the Process’. She works from a unique studio—a converted modernist swimming pool—where she blends various materials, including acrylics, oil, spray paint, and charcoal, to build complex layers of meaning.
Her work is regularly exhibited in galleries, and she has collaborated on multidisciplinary projects with organizations like the Brussels Philharmonic.
The pictorial image has long forsaken its figurative vocation. We no longer paint to represent the world but to make a different world, to attack the tensions, the cracks, the clichés of the world we inhabit. We paint in order to cope with life as it inevitably changes our sensibility, our way of feeling and thinking.
Painting is no longer just a factory of images – it’s a comment on seeing and living. When the eye has been reduced to an optimally trained reader of coded information, painting has one last virtue: it’s the figural trace of embodied memory, it nurtures colourful planes for meaningful moments, it prompts a sense of place in a world of generic spaces, foreseeable emotions and programmable thoughts.
Ellen Vrijsen’s recent practice resulted in a plethora of chromatic experiments that aim at redefining the vocation of painting as an artistic practice.
These paintings are both compelling objects and vivacious phrases of colour. A fluid green or blue background constitutes an intriguing scenography: black, red and yellow traces engage with hesitant thoughts and reoccurring intuitions.
Call them a syntaxis of memory and affect. Call them phrases that – just like dreams or hallucinations – can be read in different directions. These paintings are the corporeal act of shaping memory as an image.
They expect from you, the viewer, the most cherished and rarest thing there is: an attentive gaze and the desire to see the world through chromatic landscapes, through momentary modulations of colour and form, through minor “promises of happiness” and tangible alterations of our otherwise generally distracted perception.
Text and concept: Vlad Ionescu