Untitled (from series The Missing Script,) oil on canvas

Robert Devriendt is a painter from Belgium. In his practice, Devriendt creates artworks that borrow visual rhetoric and aesthetics from the medium of film. The artist’s works encourage audience interpretation, while purposefully leaving space for misinterpretation.

Untitled (from series The Missing Script,) oil on canvas

I love the way that Devriendt’s oil paintings act like frames of an unknown film. The works are painted on very small canvases, and often positioned on a gallery wall one after the other, similar to Noah Verrier’s 4 Seasons. The content of each painting seems tantalizingly incomplete -- there are fragments of faces, vehicles and houses seen from odd angles, and objects removed from their expected contexts. This sense that each image exists in a greater context that the viewer is not being shown allows for the spinning of wildly different narratives for each of the paintings.  

Devriendt embraces this lack of clarity, inviting a focus not necessarily on the paintings themselves, but on the undefined spaces in between.

Untitled (from series The Missing Script,) oil on canvas