He is known as the painter of silence for his ability to depict the harshest scenes, be they crucifixions, martyrdoms or last suppers, with enormous force but without melodramatic stridency. In that sense it is not too strange that this primitive flamenco has inspired artists like Bill Viola. His works are distributed in the great museums of the world, and his main paintings do not have to envy those of his contemporaries Roger van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck, two decades older. Of course, his demons and fantastic beings can compete with those of Bosch. However, the name of Dieric Bouts (1410-1475) is much less known, and now the M Leuven museum in Leuven, the city where he developed his work, dedicates a large exhibition to him, Dieric Bouts. Creator of Images, which until January 14 brings together works by the master from numerous countries.
But it also proposes seeing it from a totally different perspective: at a time when “the 19th century romantic idea of ??the artist did not exist,” says the curator, Peter Carpreau, “Bouts is a professional who works with the visual.” . And to understand his strategies of perspective and creation of universes and also the emotional impact that his works caused six centuries ago, he confronts them with Steven Spielberg’s sketches for Indiana Jones, with original drawings from the Star Wars storyboard – thanks to the collaboration of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will open in 2025–, to the film The Gospel According to Mateo by Pasolini or, the Madonnas, to photographs of Lady Gaga. The faces of Christ have beside them the exhausted face of the cyclist Eddy Merckx.
If Lady Gaga may seem somewhat forced, the worlds of Star Wars fit better with a painter whose paintings include mountains that, in flat Belgium, certainly do not exist. Universes created by Bouts, whose landscape strategies to give depth to the landscape – and move the viewer’s eyes in a continuous zig zag – create a school in the rest of Europe.
Without a doubt, Pasolini’s film also fits perfectly with the impressive Triptych of the Descent from the Cross from the Royal Chapel of Granada, which will later be restored in Brussels at the Royal Institute of Artistic Heritage and in which some of its characters They make it clear that he knew how to look profitably at Van der Weyden, of whom there are also works.
Although certainly the centerpiece of the exhibition is The Last Supper, which is usually in the central Church of San Pedro of this university city and which has now been moved to its large museum as the final culmination of the exhibition, since in it they intersect all the lines of his art, from his landscape creations, to the use of all imaginable depth techniques, from his famous linear perspective, with a single vanishing point and numerous mundane details that seek to connect with daily life, infusing a touch of realism.
A work that was commissioned by the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament of the rich medieval city in 1464 and whose contract required that he not dedicate himself to anything else during its completion, that he be assisted by theology professors who would ensure the correctness of everything painted. The work, a triptych, lasted four years. For now, in its place in the Gothic church of Saint Peter in Leuven there is a visual installation by Jill Magid that is part of the great festival that the city dedicates until January to an artist whose name they want to stop being a surprise.
