Joachim

van der Vlugt

Dutch painter Joachim van der Vlugt lives in Luxembourg. He is the epitome of a contemporary artist and yet gets all his inspiration from the classic Dutch masters. He takes the two traditional registers of landscape and portrait and mixes them around.

Joachim van der Vlugt trained at the academy of fine arts in Maastricht. After briefly dabbling with stylisme he turned his hand to painting and has never looked back. He is passionate about the great masters of Flemish painting.  Consequently has no qualms about their influence on him. Armed with a paint palette purposely short on colour and somewhat sombre, black and white, brown, beige and blue, Joachim van der Vlugt superposes the layers of paint which enables him to bring the nuances and intensity of light to the fore, and also allowing images and vaporous shapes to slowly appear. He doesn't stop there. He composes his paintings, all the while adding the layers, by accentuating certain parts but also by integrating geometric shapes or virtually transparent smears which bring together his compositions forming what he calls "an orchestrated chaos."

There is a somewhat esoteric and spiritual dimension to this cultivated painting with its myriad references. The artist amuses himself by subliminally including images into the underlying layers of his paintings. These therefore become works to be continually discovered, in front of which the spectator finds himself constantly changing his impression.

For twenty odd years Joachim van der Vlugt has been exhibiting largely in Europe, in different galleries in Luxembourg, Holland and Germany, as well as in various contemporary art fairs.