Denie Put at Base-Alpha

Artist: Denie Put

Exhibition title: Denied Reality

Venue: Base-Alpha, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: October 20 – December 2, 2017

Photography: We Document Art, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Base-Alpha, Antwerp

In 2014, Denie Put (°1991) graduated as a master of painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp. ‘Denied Reality’ is the first solo exhibition at Base-Alpha Gallery by the young Antwerp painter.

The colourful and dynamic paintings of Denie Put initially feel abstract. Dominant purple, fluorescent, harsh pink, pastel green and bright blue are alternately placed by Put in geometric or organic shapes on the canvas. By consistently varying with techniques, Put tries to avoid conventional approaches with paint. This results in a variety of brush strokes, textures and patterns. Combined with the exuberant use of colour, a sharp and edgy visual language arises.

When we look into the paintings of Put we can detect different kinds of corals, landscapes with waterfalls, fountains and rock formations. A pair of bright yellow eyes, a hare standing as a waiter in the corner, a staircase and teardrops are figurative elements that Put consciously has put between the primarily abstract shapes.

Denie Put creates a fictional world wherein he got inspired by The Fauvists, Cubists, Surrealists and Japanese woodcuts. His current work environment, a studio from a former sculptor fully stocked with sculptures, is also a highly influential factor. In there, Put tries to avoid the everyday reality and mixes various impulses into a sensible process with great attention to coincidence and experimentation. Despite that Put mainly departs from sketches, the final results are rarely similar to his original intentions.

With the monochrome backgrounds, the variety of techniques, the strange perspective or the lack of it, Put creates monumental sculptures in the midst of his canvases. Doing so the displayed series of paintings in ‘Denied Reality’ appear like a catchy and self-imaginative sculptural garden.

The title of the series ‘Rare Kwast’, which are all painted on glass, suggests that Put himself occasionally is astonished by the strange forms he creates on any surface that crosses his path.

-Eléa De Winter