Peter Proost offers us an art that profiles itself pictorially and intellectually. Every work of this artist is the result of a long and fruitful meditation on the tracks, tricks and booby-traps of Reality. Starting often with an image randomly found in the media, Peter Proost radically transforms this first image on his canvas. He always expurgates or disguises the drama found in such pictures (f.i. of Tchernobyl, a Rwanda trial, the Balkan war, etc.) while engaged in the act of painting, so as to obtain a distance between his first impression and its minute remains on the canvas. Peter Proost’s thought process is first of all an interior monologue: he does not ask that the viewer follows him to the end of his quest. The pictorial qualities of the works should suffice to enchant the beholder. And they do.
Education : Communal Academy of Mol and Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Peter Proost has steadily worked along these lines for decades, alone, without influences. The irony is that there are some evident similarities in his works and ideas with the productions of more flashy and younger names of the present Flemish School of Painting. But more often than not, Peter Proost has antedated them in no small way…
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