After three years of absences in Spain and the south of France, his Nordic temperament confronting the colors of the south, a flemish painter-worker, a painter-poet, came back to Paris, « to see, he said, what is there, not to do what we see », bringing us together a personal ensemble of a beautiful unity.
Did he express entirely his voluble temperament, intensively passionate, a crossing of anguish and nostalgia? Did he project his memories of Flemish plains under the sleepy seasons, its deadened climates suddenly agitated by storms, its fertile lands of dark colors, the ambiguous faces in the picturesque towns, the hard working coal miners , the massive factories surrounded by old walls in the style of a Van Gogh or a Verhaeren, or the unsure atmosphere where still hangs the shadowy dream of a Rodenbach, the exuberance of popular festivities, the truculence of folkloric dances, and its long solitudes of a loveless child, the lost young person, always pushed by his ideal and his rich nature? All this universe is finally transported, not described, in his painting.
Either he entrusted himself in his poems, of spontaneous writing, or he projected himself on his burned surfaces, glued superimposed, and grated, however always with sobriety in all his shades, without excess in his reliefs cut at right angles, in his glowing embers, his calcinated minerals, his obscure fireplace, his polished masses, hot as baking ovens, he does not provide us with all the secrets that inspire him. A wide unconscious power remains in the bottom of his desire. But his work is there, rich in existence: It suffices to contemplate them to love them.
