Xavier Vanlaere
Abstract painting, mixed media — accumulation, matter, memory
Information
Based in
Six-Fours-les-Plages, France
Status
Avanvue selection
Medium
Painting · Collage · Mixed media
Overview
Xavier Vanlaere builds his artworks the way one accumulates memories: in layers, by accident, by withdrawal. His abstract practice began during the 2021 lockdown, in isolation and silence, using only the materials available in his home: paint cans, lime, sand, and planks. It was there that something took hold.
Painting, projecting, superimposing, covering, incising. Simple gestures that engage a direct relationship with matter. Non-figurative, unpremeditated forms, simply welcomed in their emergence. The artwork as a space of withdrawal. An active, almost silent meditation.
Blue is his constant color: the blue of the sea, the blue of memory, the blue of the North. In the gestural works, we find something of the coast where he grew up. In his collages, fragments of newspaper, maps, sheet music, and printed texts, anything that carries a buried story within it, become emotional material. The artwork carries its own archaeology.
My view
I chose him in May 2026.
A clear blue that draws you in with its light and holds you with what it hides beneath: fragments, maps, sheet music, a memory that surfaces. An artwork that remembers, without drowning in it. I spoke with Xavier on the phone before meeting him, and it was that conversation that convinced me. The studio, this summer, confirmed it.
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Every two weeks, I write a letter about the art I truly look at. Not the art we are necessarily told to love. Simply a slower, more personal, and freer way of looking at contemporary art. Three regular features. The Selection: I present an artist. Everyday Uncommon: my eye, the exhibitions I see, and what I find in them. Behind the Scenes: I talk about Avanvue, its projects, its choices, its philosophy.