A purified language, the fruit of a profound spiritual reflection towards art, characterizes the work of Belgian artist Luc Claus.

Since the late fifties, Claus was fascinated by drawing simple structures on paper and canvas. Searching in nature, he went on a journey to aged and essential abstraction, creating work that was simple in form but demanding in content.

Refusing to see his work in terms of ideas rather than feelings, the artist looked for the essence of the human figure by stripping down the ideas and convictions that moved him. It was a long philosophical way that led to a graphical search for the ultimate and ideal representation.

While the work of Claus has been called religious-sacral, constructivist and fundamental, Claus has always been a consistent artist, one who limited himself to the simplicity of the horizontal and vertical line and a number of primary shapes that deliver a combination thereof such as the cross, the square, the rectangle, the diamond and the circle.

Vague allusions were all that Luc Claus kept of figurative art. A face, rendered in profile, imposes itself in a series of sensitive and nuanced variations. This notorious head motif, which evokes a feeling of respect and deep belief in mankind, was originally an aid in the search for expression. Going as far back as 1966 it makes recurring appearances throughout the artist’s work. Related to the way the film industry uses the frame, it became part of his search for perspectives, multiplying and repeating every possible angle and combination.

Claus worked towards depth and pure observation; his geometry was human, honest and sometimes frail (brittle). He looked for the crossroad where the artist meets his inner self. The work was not about dividing areas in a formal way, but about a subtle dialogue between the elegance of rhythm and the emotion of a slightly trembling line. The strong minimalist compositions and their spiritual-contemplative character supported the artist’s ascetic view on life, while the limited use of color, moved harmony and emotional minimalism to the foreground as characteristics. The use of a geometric vocabulary to visualize his strive towards the absolute, the pure and the authentic in life, was neutralized in its strict structure by his hesitating hand.

The handmade paper with its refractory (recalcitrant) texture and rough and irregular borders, made that materiality became a condition as a medium for the spiritual attention the artist invested. The purity of thoughts remained tied to the material action. The purest abstraction was obtained in the concentration of pen and brush, slowly tracing the paper, while the fragility of the line structures, caught in strict-ascetic compositions, resulted in a body of work that could best be described as a whole of abstract icons, the fruit of a permanent meditation.

The selective retrospective of drawings by Luc Claus from 1987 through 2006, is an homage to an artist, who for thirty years, accurately developed a tension field of minimal signs. It is an invitation to contemplate and meditate. One of the quiet monuments of Belgian art, Claus was born in Aalst, Belgium in 1930 and died in Brussels in 2006. He studied at St.-Lucas in Ghent, Belgium and at Ter Kameren in Brussels, Belgium.