Van Belleghem Roger

Roger Van Belleghem was a Belgian artist, born in Beernem in 1922 and died in Leuven in 2002. He was a painter and a sculptor. He received his education at the Academy in Bruges, at Sint-Lucas in Ghent and at the National Higher Institute of Antwerp. He created portraits and surrealistic compositions that demonstrate great imagination. He often contrasted the female nude with the dismemberment, death and aggression in society. He used a very refined technique. From the press: “His means of expression may differ – cloth, copper, iron – but his inner desires, his passion, remain one; the fear of the drama of life, the riddle of the human mind and all that misery of the inability to communicate. In the most typical paintings, that obsession erupts like a storm. The tense, twisted bodies that flee in who knows what sighs, the grinning, scornful masks, the unreal cities that collapse into a red-shining darkness or bear witness to a silent world” and “R.V.B. leads us along the paths of his fiction only to secretly abandon us at the first crossroads and leave us alone, powerless in the face of so much devilry. This worthy descendant of the great Flemish fantasists such as De Ghelderode, Jean Ray, Bosch or Breugel, leaves no doubt that the wave of visions that rushes over us comes straight from his subconscious.” In 1966 he received the honorary diploma at the Salon d'Art Libre de Paris, in 1968 the Prize of Contemporary Art (Belgium), in 1980 the first prize Edm. Deglumes in Mechelen. Tribute exhibitions were held in Sint-Genesius-Rode in 1987 and in the Casino Kursaal in Ostend in 1992. He also held numerous individual exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. Roger Van Belleghem carried out several official portrait commissions. He is listed in the Lexicon of West Flemish visual artists v, BAS I and Two centuries of signatures of Belgian artists. (Piron)