Dirk Caluwaerts

Dirk Caluwaerts is a 21st century romanticist born in 1975. Graduated from the Antwerp art academy, where he started his quest for beauty in a polluted world that makes him wander through desolate and undiscovered inner landscapes. His oil paintings are his ultimate hide-outs, for they breathe solitude and melancholy, but also the desire for what Michel Houellebecq described as ‘the possibility of an island’, the desire for a ‘love in which everything seems simple and is given at this very moment.’
In the unsettling backgrounds of his canvases he evokes the pain of a human being deprived of social interaction or life itself and puzzled by the way mankind has spoilt the beauty of nature. The topics Caluwaerts addresses are obviously not lighthearted, but they do not necessarily result in sadness either. Dirk work is one of the coordinators of Impart, a collective that participates in Art under attack, by sharing 11 percent of his receipts with artists operating in the cultural field of a war zone.