“A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for ever.” John Keats

Artwork

The contemporary figurative painter has neither the same mental universe nor the same perspectives with regard to the Masters of the past.
What the art of Bert Mertens translates is a reality of fragmentation, duplication, distortion, ambiguity. His hyperrealism emphasizes the beauty or the unusual in the heart of the banal, and the enchantment at the very core of what was thought to be disenchanted.
His work displays three aspects of this.

THIS CAUGHT MY EYE

A hyperrealism that leads the eye to see the beauty in the banality, and reveals the being beneath the appearance.

VISUAL POETRY

Visual poetry can arise from an unusual angle of vision or framing, from a close-up shot or from the unexpected assembly of objects.

PORTRAITS

Not posed portraits, but the trace of a significant instant.