
Ker-Hove
Ker-Hove was a Belgian artist born in Ghent in 1921 and died in 2008. He was a painter and sculptor. In 1960, when he moved to Brussels, he focused on painting. His early works were inspired by Bernard Buffet and the Cubists. But soon he found his personal style. He paints typically Flemish. His technique is raw and direct. Alain Viray described him as "an expressionist painter with a firm paste, spread with anger ... A pamphlet that passionately attacks civil society, its judges and the army ... A painter with figuration treated with an ax, angular and not without clumsiness that shows a real temperament." Ker-Hove called himself a pacifist, a catholic and a nonconformist, three adjectives that could be easily associated with the topics discussed. The subject is man, the man who is confronted with his desires, his fears and his contradictions. Women or sexuality are regularly ridiculed. He combines love and death, marriage and widowhood, thought and flesh, flower and candle. He chooses to sign under a pseudonym: a contraction of family names. But "Ker-Hove" has become more than a pseudonym, it's a second skin, the venerable doctor of law Mr. Hyde. It is "Ker-Hove" that allows him to admire both Saint Francis and Arafat, to speak of the sin of the flesh and to appreciate Scarlett O'Hara, to paint people with lustful looks and to nurture hatred for mostly male chauvinists. It is still "Ker-Hove" that serves as an outlet for a compass environment from which he can free himself through satire. After exhibitions in Bruges in 197 in Brussels in 1973, he decided not to visit the galleries and only participated in the fairs organized by the Museum of Spontaneous Art. Exhibited in the Musé d´Art Spontané in 1996. Mentioned in two centuries signatures of Belgian artists. (PIRON, www.musee-art-spontane.be)