Since childhood, Johan Van Mullem has been drawing and painting faces – aged, marked, parchment-like figures – attentive to the altered beauty of skin that time has creased. Seeming to emerge from a whirlwind of matter and light, animated by an inner sfumato, these featureless faces unfold in a deep palette through which the painter explores a sovereign interiority, rising to the surface with a slow incandescence. The figures thus emerge from a dark background, as if extracted from a troubled, archaic memory shared by all.
The Belgian artist follows in a tradition of the weathered face, worked to the point of erasure, where painting becomes the site of an inner experience. Alteration, if not liquefaction, is not so much a spectacular gesture as a slow and patient excavation: reminiscences and sensations mingle incessantly, overcome by a grave darkness where light and movement become the privileged vectors of buried emotions, revealing the impetus of a spirit that transcends appearance and allows the irreducible part of existence to surface.
Visionary faces are now replaced by landscapes streaked with nascent greens, diaphanous blues and glowing ochres, expanses where the eye delights in exploring aquatic environments, sometimes surrounded by cliffs and jagged rocks forming a rich phantasmagoria of edges, all bathed in a renewed clarity. Each work seems to be in tune with the elements, permeated by their instability and shifting breath. The eye perceives the humid, beaded air, the diaphanous density of waning clouds, the thrill of restless water suspended in the immensity of the sky. The outline of a circular, stretched-out time emerges, where creation and erosion become one. Van Mullem imbues his landscapes with a tactile memory, made up of moments of physical absorption and connection to the body, affirming the epiphanic significance of intensely sensitive painting. Fullness and contemplation are the key words, without these canvases renouncing the shadow or the promise of renewal, extending towards the horizon this quest for depth that remains intact.
While the artist's technical virtuosity was first evident in his work with engraving and printing inks, diluted and then reworked through patient layers of superimposition, he is now introducing oil painting into his work for the first time. Slower and more enveloping, this age-old technique retains colours in a new thickness, inscribing his paintings in an unprecedented chromatic chronicle, where all the colours of time are written.
- Maud de la Forterie, journalist and art historian