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Eric Moerenhout - Painter

 © F.Swaters. 

Eric Moerenhout is a Belgian artist, who was born into painting at the age of 15, after a strict academic career scattered with taboos and mediocre teachers whom were stuck in their narrow catholic minds.

Under-rated, discredited, diminished, wounded before even existing, and forced to be nomadic by his family who did not understand him; it is by chance that he will pass through the gates of Saint-Luc in 1964, where he will very soon identify with the radicalized youth who question the supreme authority of adults, and where he will find a fascination for the revolutionary movements of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, emancipation of black people in the USA, research of the hippie movements… the time is rich, the world is changing, May ‘68 is near.

 

Eric will meet Pierre Sterckx, an already fascinated and fascinating teacher, whom will change the course of his life by opening all doors of a new religion, because it is indeed a new world that the young artist will respect religiously and dedicate his entire life to. 

Why? To escape the language from which he never received the keys to understand, to be able to get free from himself. He just found the mean of expression which is in perfect harmony with his sensitivity.  

 

A self-taught man thirsty for universal knowledge and experiences, a solitary researcher, a lost mathematician. The young painter sinks in his research and will very fast arouse interest. 

Deserved but “unfair because too premature” to his taste, Eric, for whom the quest of justice and truth is pitiless, rebels, hides, shuts away, mutilates himself, and then loses himself in his neurosis, unable to rest until he tries again to do what he always values to be somehow unfinished and therefore unworthy. 

Because it is all about respect, one does not trifle with Art. 

Watercolors of the Artist made n the 70' 

At a time where everything goes so fast, where everything gets consummated or wasted, where people run more and more while knowing less and less where they are going, hungry for fast success, for easy recognition; Eric is somewhere else, suspended in his bubble. The hermit searches, concentrated, decided unintendedly to never give up on his quest and to take all necessary detours. He follows his thread which is often more red than blue, putting back every day his inseparable work on the table: the one of the painter always in his quest for truth, the one of the intellectual bulimic thirsty for knowledge, and the one of the wounded man healing his soul. 

A lot of detours and dark paths the man will take in search of his language, since his beginnings where the raging desire and the vital need to discover the mystery of light by the obsessing study of color and all its shades, passing by examining from all side injustice, his wounds, his pains, hidden in the disfigured tensions and torsions of effort, so sincerely brought up in his expressionist paintings, 

Oil on canvas in the 80' - Olympic Games in 1984 and  news items having marked the Artist 

but also in the true perception of the soul of artists loved in secret, painted with so much respect, to the frivolity of his fauve paintings, symbol of a happy time, until finally reviving form by color all in simplicity and humility.

Oil on canvas in the 80' - Some portraits and nudes of a series 

Eric is finally at peace and his work is as true as his life. 

 

​Among all the detours in this eventful life, there is one that must be acknowledged, an invention that will bring the artist in a decade of creation: the development and commercialization of a wooden brick allowing the construction of a house in less than 3 months. 

The painter, faced with the business world, will come back to his art before losing his soul in the tribulations of a world so diametrically opposed to his own quest. 

                   

Powerful and wise comeback, the Art simply takes up its place.

From the big studio of his beginnings where reigned the nice smell of turpentine mixed with rabbit-skin glue, brushes of all kinds, and tubes of colors by the hundreds, into the clinical laboratory where a few brushes remain, and only 3 tubes of colors, a couple of interior voyage later, Eric, helped by his computers, has not changed, he is lighter and free: finally allowed to paint transparently. 

An eclectic, engaged and accepted thought, making him the instrument of the synthesis of his studies. 

 

Florence Swaters - July 2018

Education 

1964 - 1968

Saint-Luc in Brussels - Visual Arts and architectural drawings 

1968 - 1970

1971 - 1973

Ateliers de l'Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles

Mosaic in semiprecious stones with the designer Ado CHALE

The studio of the painter in the 90'

 © Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt.

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