Jan Bollaert

Jan Bollaert

Artista belga que pinta cuadros y hace esculturas dentro de lo que el denomina neo-popart.

Información de Studio Art.

Jan Bollaert born in Antwerp (Belgium) 1958. He would have preferred to have grown up during the 1950’s, a period of innocence and huge expectations, of film stars and super heroes. He readily admits his image of that time is fictitious. Although he witnessed the tail end of it, he has no conscious memory of it. He was born too late to achieve his ideal, which was to be young in 1950’s and grown up in the 1960’s. For him, the 1960’s are synonymous to Pop Art and popular culture, a time when life was one huge adventure. He regards Pop Art as the most important post-war art movement. "It is the only art form that shows the relationship between art and society as a whole. It elevates banality to the level of art. It lifts people out of the unbearable lightness of being." This longing for the 1950’s and the vitality of the 1960’s have both left their mark in Jan Bollaert’s paintings, which are pervaded with a sense of humor and nostalgia.

Bollaert combines divergent imagery in his paintings, which are frequently diptychs, kitsch little dogs, angels, comic strip figures, historical characters and antique documents, bronze castings, miscellaneous hardware and other items. There is no direct, logical connection, for a painting is not a rebus. The viewer is allowed total freedom to make their own associations and may attribute their own meaning. Most striking in Bollaert’s work is his strong tendency toward the Baroque, in the stone saints and angels he depicts, but also in the Chinese wallpaper motifs he incorporates into many canvases as background motif. Not to mention the excessively muscled physique of the super heroes who simultaneously hark back to the ‘paradise lost’ of the 1950’s.