Matthieu Claus

'Cellular Structures'

De Clercq and Ginsberg are bronze casters and metalworkers who offer their expertise to visual artists. Their company, located in "Uustakker," has a warehouse in Beveren-Leie, on the Ghent-Kortrijk highway. The old garage also houses the De Clercq-Ginsberg Gallery, a pleasant, square, industrial space where there's often something interesting to see.

Yesterday, a duo exhibition by Sven Boel and Matthieu Claus opened there, curated by their friend Jonas Vansteenkiste, proving once again that curators aren't always renowned artists. It really helps if you create impressive work yourself. Then you also know how to do justice to others. And here too. The crazy rock-n-roll of Boel's colorful sculptures pairs beautifully with Claus's paintings. I'd call the duo's painter a "Jean Brusselmans" on speed, because I think his abstracts, in all their detachment, have a distinctly landscape-like quality. It must be me, because of my association with his stenciled, stippled, stamped, and disassembled formal language, in which I detect clouds, shrubs, and architecture. Blue predominates, according to the artist himself, due to his longing for tranquility in works that have a graphic, nervous, layered complexity. Everything is piled up, torn apart, and restructured in these canvases. Claus also dares to continually question them and repaint them, without compassion. They surprised me with their subtle paint skin, a quality that remains unknown in digital form, on an Instagram window. All the more reason to actually see them.

Sven Boel injects his freestanding sculptures with funk, in organic shapes with a candy-colored hue that is often cast into the mass. To say his forms were created is to discredit them. He rather lets them "happen" and consolidates them afterward. The material was compressed into lumps or launched from high above. The calculated "random" of the situation subsequently went through classic stages such as molding and editing. Chance and control, in other words. Happening and direction. At its most charming, when Boel sends you on a walk, it becomes a kind of metal device in which a sphere rotates, which "signifies" itself.

Expo ' Cellular structures', De clerq-Ginsberg Art Gallery, Beveren-Leie

© Frederik van Laere

The Wrong House

Sven Boel and Matthieu Claus explore the boundary between abstraction and figuration in their work, always seeking interaction with the viewer. Boel’s approach extends beyond static artworks—his pieces come to life only when they engage in dialogue with others. He experiments with forms and media, using art as a means of communication, often through physical interaction or self-built mechanisms. At the heart of his work lies a central shape, a core that drives interaction and dynamism. It is not about the object itself but the exchange it provokes. Claus, on the other hand, redefines materials by placing them in new contexts. His works emerge from scrap and discarded objects, which he transforms by stripping away layers, restructuring, and overpainting, granting them new meaning. The essence of Claus’ work often lies in an underlying shape—a ‘cell’ that reveals itself through the layers and determines the structure of his paintings. His abstraction is not only visual but also emotionally charged—an invitation to uncover the hidden rhythms and structures that exist between the visible and the invisible. Both artists seek an essential form that serves as the foundation of their work—a core that allows them to explore the layers within their creations. In this central cell or shape, they find the basis for their investigations into interaction, recontextualization, and the space between the seen and the unseen.

Curator: Jonas Vansteenkiste & Isabelle Bergmann​

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The Art Couch - Hold the Line’, Intra Muros Art Gallery - by Patrick Auwelaert

Recycling

Of the quartet, only Matthieu Claus (born 1977) is familiar to us. We were introduced to his work in the group exhibition "Summer abstract" at Kunstforum De Koolputten in Waasmunster in the summer of 2024. Claus, who lives and works in Ghent, paints multi-layered and colorful abstract oil paintings on which lines, geometric patterns, and organic elements form a balanced whole. Looking at his work, your eye initially seems to struggle to orient itself: your gaze drifts aimlessly from one part of the canvas to the next. You involuntarily search for clues that will allow you to fathom the whole, to understand it, to tie it all together.

The key is to keep looking. Gaze takes time. Gradually, you recognize abstracted landscapes, parts of which were created using stencils of circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, diamonds, and honeycombs. They resemble pictorial assemblages, composed of what at first glance appear to be industrial components: remnants of scrap heaps, construction sites, vacant lots, and abandoned sites. With a few touches of green here and there, in deliberately sloppy brushstrokes, reminiscent of vegetation. Think of concrete, bricks, twisted steel, and rusted iron, among which stubborn weeds sprout. Discarded materials that are only good for recycling.

Yellow Dots

And that's precisely what Claus's work is all about. Literally, in the sense that the artist reuses rejected canvases by largely painting over them and occasionally incorporating certain parts of the original images into the new compositions—a method also frequently employed by Sam Dillemans. The artist also sometimes scrapes off layers of paint to paint over them. The matte, smooth, and faded quality of the scraped-off layers contrasts sharply with the areas of paint he leaves intact.

Image Removed (2024), one of the four canvases Claus is exhibiting at Intra Muros, lives up to its title: the painting has been completely scraped off, which doesn't mean there's nothing left to see on the canvas. The original image remains, only it gives a faded impression, comparable to a photocopy of an image made on a photocopier whose color toners are down to their last bits of ink. Because Claus later felt something was missing from the canvas, he added a yellow dot to each corner. These dots complete the work. They pin the image down, so to speak, like thumbtacks.

Eyecatcher

Another of Claus's exhibited works, The Escape (2024), is a textbook example of how essential omission can be. Centrally on the canvas, we see a composition consisting of superimposed geometric patterns (squares and triangles), lines of varying thickness, and landscape elements. The previously muted colors are given a contrasting accent in the form of a right angle in azure blue. But what is particularly striking about the canvas is the large amount of white above and below the central image, interrupted here and there by overpainted lines.

Among the three other works by Claus on display, The Escape is a real eye-catcher. The central image, with its numerous, often subtle fields of color, seemingly bursts out of the white. In Chinese culture, white is considered the color of death. Seen in this light, what escapes the white on the canvas is an ode to life, vibrant with color. It is perhaps no coincidence that, in a conversation with the undersigned, the painter indicated that he would strive for more restrained work in the near future, meaning that he wanted to give more space to white, so that what remains untouched appears all the more vibrant.

KUNSTPOORT - The blues of artist Matthieu Claus - by Kramboer

At first glance, it's the blues in Matthieu Claus's paintings that are particularly captivating. Forget the blue of Yves Klein for once and let yourself be captivated by the poetic blue hues of Matthieu Claus. They are difficult to define: cobalt blue, apple blue, sky blue, light blue, grayish blue, Prussian blue, royal blue… blue with a hint of magenta… in two words, they are "magical blues" that give his paintings a playful lightness. Abstract is an all-encompassing concept. With Matthieu Claus, abstract is more than a concept; his "abstracts" prove to be more than just abstract. Read the carefully chosen titles carefully; they open the door to a broader view of his canvases. There's "Food for Thought," "Outside (Cloud)," "Garden Poem," and there's also "The Odd One Out." The title speaks for itself. With Matthieu Claus, abstract is more than an intangible concept. A reality lurks behind grids, hiding between lines and planes, often in muted, less vibrant colors. With a little imagination, you can conjure up the odd one out.

Sometimes the blue becomes too overwhelming, as in "The Escape," and a great deal of white takes over the canvas, the blue then eludes the viewer's eye. And... the landscape plays hide-and-seek.

The subtlety of his work demands attentive observation. The beauty lies in the details, in the layers, the nuances of the paint, the deliberate overpainting, the soft, visible brushstrokes... I become lyrical and struggle to find the right words, although words aren't necessary. Try to experience his paintings as a viewer, to live them, and you'll never forget them. The exceptional blues linger on the retina. After a while, you hear a hint of piano music swell in the background. I find the juxtaposition of "Food for Thought" with Catharina Dhaen's painting "So Carefree, Quiet and Free" remarkable. The colors speak to each other and act as allies, allowing the art of both artists to shine. My imagination runs wild; in both, I see landscapes, fields, mountains, even industry, and for a moment, in the painting by Catharina Dhaen, I think of Raveel.

Matthieu Claus's paintings are incredibly appealing thanks to their unique color palette, their playful shapes, and their desire for interaction with the viewer. We're curious about the rest of his career, and perhaps he'll conjure up new horizons with his brush.

The Art couch - Summer abstract - review by Patrick Auwelaert

Where does abstraction begin and end, and where does figuration begin and end? The line isn't always clear. Anyone who looks long enough at a work presented as abstract will often discover hints of figuration. On the other hand, numerous figurative paintings contain elements that could be described as abstract. This seemingly paradoxical duality is also present in Zomers abstract. Sometimes the title of a work sets the viewer on the right track. For example, one of the exhibited works by Matthieu Claus (Kortrijk, 1977) is called "Een Vreemd eend in de bijt" (A Strange Duck in the Pond) (2022). As a seasoned viewer, it only takes a fraction of a second to recognize the schematic shape of a duck in the multicolored ensemble of geometric and amorphous or organic elements that make up the composition. The same applies to almost all of Claus's works in the exhibition: they have a descriptive title that corresponds to what is often easily recognizable on the canvas, without significantly detracting from their abstract status.

Incidentally, Claus, like Catharina Dhaen (Antwerp, 1992) and Christine Roggeman (Sint-Niklaas, 1988), is a name to watch. His multi-layered compositions lie somewhere between geometric and lyrical abstraction, but their often exuberant and warm colors lean toward a more sensitive form of abstraction. The artist draws inspiration from construction sites, industrial sites with rhythmic steel plates that exert a repetitive and structuring impact on the canvas, concrete blocks with cast iron, and discarded materials. Just as a writer must delete and rewrite to arrive at a refined language, Claus sometimes scrapes off layers of paint to repaint them. Like a Meccano builder with paint, he constructs and deconstructs his canvases until they are perfectly balanced, gradually adding landscape elements. Occasionally, in terms of their architectural composition and depth, they are reminiscent of the work of Mil Ceulemans and Tina Gillen.

Kunstcahier 't kunstforum

There is no art under heaven that a true painter cannot discover without understanding it,

wrote painter-poet Lucas d’Heere in 1565 in his plea in defense of painting, which he addressed to the Antwerp chamber of rhetoric, De Violieren. Translated into modern terms, this statement implies that there is no art, no subject on earth that a thorough painter cannot grasp. And with this characteristic, I arrive at the introspective work of Matthieu Claus, who, as a visual poet, engages in an ambiguous relationship with reality. His visual language reveals a perfectly measured symbiosis of a sensitive intuition and a broad view of the micro-reality of his living space: nature, landscape, architecture, industry. Beauty lies both in the white magic of a cloud and in the scrap heap of industrial waste. The summery, exuberant use of color certainly takes precedence over the underlying enigmatic narrative, the hint or the wink: his mental meanderings, nevertheless offered a possible clarification by the prosaic titles, ensuring the connection with reality is never fully severed. These oil paintings evoke a concentration of associations, suggestions, and stimuli in which we are forced to attempt to recognize a reality, or at least an illusion of reality, for this is certainly not absolute, nor even distinct. The frozen movement in the image is beguiling and maintains the illusion of presence. A gaze that poses questions. Within the layered paintwork, sometimes sparse and transparent, then grainy and impasto, lies an intriguing playing field where arabesque lines flirt with geometric patterns and repetitive structures. A fill-in-the-blank exercise for the viewer. The exploration awaits, projecting its own story onto the predominantly apple-blue-sea-green color field. This anchoring of spirituality and symbolism challenges not only the usual codes of perception, but also our own self-reflection.

Text: curator Freddy Huylenbroeck

The Art Couch - Kaleidoscope - review by Yves Joris

Writing is scraping, painting is scraping: Matthieu Claus

Matthieu Claus scrapes, paints over, and reuses layers, creating a play of color that invites the viewer to discover their own story. In his recent work, he draws inspiration from the graffiti scene and urban environments, where he plays with hidden patterns and contrasts, giving his work a playful and dynamic appearance. His interest in geometry and form, developed during his studies at KASK Ghent, is also reflected in his work. In this exhibition, Claus presents a selection of his recent works, which testify to his artistic evolution and experimental approach. His paintings express his thoughts, translated into colorful and layered compositions. He invites us to enter these vibrant, fictional landscapes and enjoy the visual and emotional experience they offer.

Kunstpoort

Matthieu Claus, born in 1977

What Matthieu has in common with the other artists is his use of exuberant colors. Blues and greens reveal that the artist is depicting a landscape. Grids and clean lines remind me of an urban industrial landscape. Matthieu Claus labors on the canvas, not satisfied with a single layer. His work demands introspection. The artist is not only a painter but also a construction worker who constructs, layer after layer, sometimes hesitantly and often accurately, until a well-conceived result emerges from the paint and the canvas is ready for the admiring and questioning gaze of the viewer.
Suddenly I see a cloud. Is it really a cloud? My imagination runs wild. And this is again what Matthieu Claus has in common with the other artists: he appeals to the viewer's creativity.

Text by Kramboer (Expo Kaleidoscoop, TaLeArt Galerie '24)