/ Phillippe Badert

Philippe Badert (1962) is an up-and-coming Belgian painter living and working in Ostend, a Flemish port city on the Belgium coast. He graduated from the Ostend Art Academy. He belongs to the local artistic circle of William Sweetlove. He has participated in many exhibitions around Belgium. He won a competition at Cartistic Flanders (2007) and received an honourable mention at the Stan Raemdock Prize (2018). In 2021, he was one of the 70 artists (out of more than 1,000 entries) selected for a renowned group show Belgicart (BOZAR) by the jury, led by Sam Dillemans. His work is in the permanent collection of Mercator Museumschip. He is represented by TaLe Art Gallery (TAG), run by Tanja Leys in Sing-Lievens-Houtem.

The artist seeks inspiration in his everyday environment – in bleak urban and abandoned spaces and in the sea – filled with ordinary people in everyday situations. In his process, he often uses existing analogue photos. He inverts these images to give them new life using cyanography, an old photographic technique known as the cyanotype or blueprint process, first introduced by English astronomer and experimental photographer Sir John Herschel (1792–1871) in 1842. These "new" images become the basis for his oil paintings. As a result, his work has many shades of blue, which help him understand and deal with the essence of shadow and light. His subjects are never dynamic in capturing movement but are left frozen in time and space. Consequently, his paintings often give an atmosphere of loneliness and alienation.

I paint images I made myself. Sometimes my grandchildren will pose for me. Sometimes images come from newspapers, magazines or the internet… even my mom’s shoe box where old, yellowed black and white family photos are kept. My paintings, therefore, often contain elements of photographs that already have a life and story behind them and bear the scars of time. Sometimes my paintings contain a certain uneasiness, but I always leave the possibility for the viewer to fill in part of the story and come to one's own conclusions.
– Phillippe Badert/Kspaces Archive, Turin (2022)