WAREGEM.- For over ten years, Denis de Gloire, wandering about in his atelier in Waregem, Belgium, has been working on a impressive hommage to Jackson Pollock who was born on the 28 th of January 1912 in Cody (Wyoming) and who passed away in New York 1956.

After such a long period and passion for his subject, it seems as De Gloire has become the incarnation of Pollock, holding and moving his paintpalet, sharing and feeling the same shades of colour the man he most inspires did before him. Pollock’s spirit but also Franz Kline, Yves Klein, Engelbert van Anderlecht, Robert Motherwell, Louis Morris and Robert Indiana roam his chambers of creativity, in the form of canvases, merging as a crowd, refering to those outbursts that marked many in the past.Remarcable for his most fascinating démarche, is his statement: “I am not an artist. I make paintings.”

An understatement that helps us in a way to understand what made this man continue this ferocity and continuous explosion of strikes on the canvas Pollock incited him to perform, without copying the past but simply continuing the manifestation of it.

The underlayer of the paintings stipulate the colour palet and the kind of colorful radiation molding the environment in a way that arises from strokes of paint, a web broided with texture, flashes of silver and color reactions protruding and vanishing over and over again.

More than a half century after Jackson Pollock rocked the art world, his drip canvases are just as powerful as when the paint first dried. Although iconic, Jack the Dripper still unsettles the aesthetically weak of heart and confronts every artist who wants to make his or her mark. Abandoning the easel and applying house paint with a repertoire of gestures, this American colossus wrenched modern art away from tradition, making Pablo Picasso seem like a classicist in contrast. Immune to ridicule or appropriation, Pollock’s subversion has extended well beyond the life span of other revolutionary art. While Andy Warhol is readily mimicked and tamed, Jackson Pollock holds mysteries that remain unexplained — even by subsequent discoveries in fluid dynamics or fractal geometry. Quite simply, he gets to people.

Denis de Gloire is not afraid of Jackson Pollock. Other abstract painters may sublimate or circumvent, but this Flemish artist takes him head on. Pollock’s innovative technique became so synonymous with the artist that no one dared to use it; but by grabbing the Abstract Expressionist’s baton, de Gloire pays Pollock homage by separating the master’s art from his technique. Working away from picture-making as well as his training, Pollock proclaimed, “I am Nature.” Acknowledging the starting point for his own painterly struggles, de Gloire says, “I am Jackson Pollock.”

Due to the celebration of Pollock’s 100th anniversary, this most impressive hommage is presented in the historical halls of the Belfry of Bruges.

An exhibition that will burn it’s way on your retina.