Max Kesteloot, 1990 (BE) - delves up images from an extensive and chaotic archive of photographs and short films, looking for what he calls "things he could have painted".
Following the classical idea of what a painting is, he works with acrylic and ink pigment on Belgian linen. The works of Kesteloot seem to frame the almost unnoticed background, the square centimeters next to a movie star's head, or a vague memory, halted. (…)
Having "a five finger discount on everything he sees", Max Kesteloot pickpockets images. A twig put on a windshield or a streetcorner view, they are stills from short films, often frozen mid-zoom. Working on canvas now with digital images rather than on wood with analogue print as he used to, allows him agility in size while letting him reframe the painting until the last minute, playing with its negative space. (…) His choice of scenes suggest a presence of a "before" and an "after", as the grain of the filmic early digital camera grants movement to his still lives.
A life between stillness and motion, he either spends stretches of time on each one of these paintings hibernating in the Ostend studio, or driving around the South with a mattress in the trunk, snapping images in a trail of continuity, like bugs on the rear window. Kesteloot, moved by a will to paint, looks for "good lost corners, places that appeal to him". (…) Max Kesteloot's aesthetics have a strong air of that, and a salty sunny gush of America. A single yellow rose, a blurry palmtree outline, it's the type of images you could imagine living in the corner of Lana del Rey's batting lashes.
(excerpts from a text by Céline Mathieu, April 2023)
