Biography & Statement

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​Max Kesteloot, 1990 (BE) delves up images from an extensive and chaotic archive of photographs and short films, looking for what he calls “things he could have painted”. Following the classical idea of what a painting is, he works with acrylic and ink pigment on Belgian linen.

 

The works of Kesteloot seem to frame the almost unnoticed background, the square centimeters next to a movie star’s head, or a vague memory, halted. Having “a five finger discount on everything he sees”, Max Kesteloot pickpockets images from everywhere, reframing them in his own world. A life between stillness and motion, he either spends stretches of time on each one of these paintings hibernating in the Ostend studio, or driving around the South with a mattress in the trunk, snapping images in a trail of continuity, like bugs on the rear window. Kesteloot, moved by a will to paint, looks for “good lost corners, places that appeal to him”. Max Kesteloot’s aesthetics have a strong air of that, and a salty sunny gush of America. A single yellow rose, a blurry palmtree outline, it’s the poetry of everyday misplacement.

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