Art Papers
May/June 1990

Eric Verhal
University of Leuven Faculty Club, Belgium
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Eric Verhal's recent mixed media paintings represent aspects of both his Belgian heritage and the contemporary, international scope of his vision. Born in Roeselare, Belgium, Verbal lived in the United States where he acquired an M.F.A. at Washington University in St. Louis, subsequently returning to Belgium to teach and paint. His exhibition at the University of Leuven Faculty Club is massive and comprehensive, showing sixty works dating from 1984 to the present, including black and white mixed media paintings on paper, painted assemblages on canvas, and circular, platelike ceramic sculptures which extend his pictorial concerns. In these works, Verbal uses the formal language of expressive abstraction to convey his visceral understanding of the Belgian landscape: its plazas and grassy fields, small forests, and narrow, sluggish rivers and canals, while also engaging in a playful exploration of the paintings' surfaces. These two aspects interact to produce a curious tension as the viewer is forced to simultaneously engage in formalistic and literal meanings, shifting between the two readings while traversing the spaces of the work.

In his 1988-89 series of black and white acrylic paintings on paper, Verbal loosely attached pieces of aluminum, sandpaper, leather and wood in varying degrees of relief. This dense interplay of materials and techniques forms part of these works' meanings. Untitled (#46) focuses on two biomorphic forms which dominate their visual fields because of their relative sizes. This dominance is subverted, however, by the forms' integration into a forest-like scene implied by vigorous black and gray markings. Smaller biomorphic forms are arranged spatially to suggest a pathway leading to these vegetative/expressive areas. Nailed to this section is a small wooden plank covered loosely with similarly assertive black brush strokes in which the negative areas of the natural wood tone form maze-like patterns. This painted section of wood contains several layers of meaning; first, they are literal references to the materials and impressions of the forest, and secondly, they are art historical, as the maze's black ground and unpainted wood figure recall ancient Greek pottery painting. In another section of the work, offsetting these natural materials and references to history, Verbal places shaped sections of aluminum to form a rectangle. The gleam and geometric outline of the metal as well as its associations with technology creates another sense of environment: that of contemporary architecture. Here the linguistic play of dualisms related to nature and culture add to the sensual play of ideas and feelings on the surface of the paper.

In Untitled (#45), Verbal sets up opposing tensions in various ways to give the work a sense of precarious, finely tuned balance. Its dominating theme centers around implied centrifugal forces in which painted areas and cut-out shapes of aluminum and wood are arranged around the periphery of the paper to create a strong force for their dispersal. But this spatial arrangement also suggests a vortex pulling all the elements back to the center, through the surface and into its depths. This sense that the pieces are swirling towards the interior is subverted, however, by the white color of the vortex; the white tending to advance from the painting's surface as the darker shapes recede into it. Suggestions of literal meanings add a further complexity. For example, loosely painted and drawn lines in one area of the piece signify a sheet of paper on which a distressed and painted aluminum shape is placed in such a way as to suggest a figure: a metaphorical figure painting in an abstract work. Another densely painted wooden form suggesting a painted easel adds a further element of tension to the work.

In other works, such as the "Rai" series, Verbal adds a wider variety of materials to the papers' surfaces. Positioning and layering glued and nailed sections of painted canvas, wood, sandpaper, leather, plastic jar tops, and other manufactured objects, Verhal creates a sense of evolving, referring both to the artist's process of working and the progressive understanding of the viewer.

These works represent Verbal's dialogue about himself and painting, balancing multiple stories about the artist, the process of painting, and the place in which this drama is enacted. Operating in the space between resolution and irresolution, this performance unfolds both abstractly and literally, utilizing sensual forms and geometry, vision and language.

In contrast to the smaller, largely monochromatic paper pieces, Groot Landschap (1988,92" x 72") is typical of his series of large, ambitious constructions developed in ascending levels of complexity from 1986 to the present. Two horizontal rectangular paintings on canvas are joined in the center by wooden upright beams, forming a subtle cruciform shape, which recalls the omnipresence of the cross in Catholic Belgium. The vigorously painted flanking canvas panels are bordered by bands of shiny aluminum, while the wooden inner section has a wide, centered stripe of gridded aluminum squares suggesting shingles. Shaped sections of painted wood form the head and feet of the central upright section which grounds and centers the whole, while the horizontal of the cross is composed of painted rectangular canvases and can be likened to the relationship of the transept to the nave in a cathedral. In another reading, the central portion becomes a pathway, bisecting the sensuously painted areas of landscape on either side. The painted panels evoke the domesticated Belgian landscape: green grass, blue sky and water, and the black of the tiny forested areas. The shiny aluminum and geometric shapes allude to man's presence in nature, the shingles suggesting an industrial alternative to the traditional tiled rooftops of Belgian homes and the bordering strips limiting the horizontal expanse of the fields with housing or industrial areas.

Verbal's use of the formal elements of painting and abstract manipulation of materials operates in several ways: as signs of the familiar objects used in his studio or his everyday environment, as sensual information to convey his own experience of place, and as an extension of traditional Flemish painting in its attention to certain surface characteristics: to those of the paintings as well as to the surfaces of the depicted objects. Historically, this devotion to surfaces --  way light reveals its opacity or transparency, density, or reflectivity -- was viewed as manifestations of God's workings, with the artist acting as His intermediary. Verbal's splendid use of surface effects acknowledges the past, absorbing into his work the painted object of a Van Dyck or a Vermeer. But he also operates within a contemporary dialogue, focusing on the meaning and aesthetic potential in actual materials, thus reflecting changes in contemporary attitudes. Devoted to the materiality of paint, lyrical abstraction, and expressionistic brushwork, he combines these attributes of painting with a close attention to the properties of his collaged materials. Wood and metal, punched or scored, always retain their material source. Abstracted formally and spatially, all these materials and techniques become a playground of invention and painterly mastery.

The totality of Verhal's work represents a process of confronting himself in relation to his physical a spiritual world; the past becomes incorporated into the present. The miniature physical landscape of Belgium -- its fields and houses, countryside and villages -- and its social one -- its spheres of the public and private, religious and secular -- are so closely entwined that they are sometimes indistinguishable to outsiders as separate entities; yet divisions and tensions are a real, if subterranean, force in Belgian society. Verhal uses these phenomena to create rich, complex works which mirror the social as well as the physical and artistic forces that constitute his life.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist and art critic living in Chicago