Through various landscapes, distorted by dreamlike visions of flowers and other realistically drawn flora, Vanpoucke exhibits a world inspired by memories and existential questions, rather than by a visible reality. Like the many walks the artist takes around his studio during sunset or sunrise, Vanpoucke’s paintings appear ever to shimmer between night and day, between being awake and asleep, and between the dream and the mundane. What is real can no longer be ascertained. Surroundings become contexts and the landscape becomes the territory of the mind. Even though, in appearance, Vanpoucke’s paintings seem highly different from his drawings, they both possess a strong sense for modern-day Romanticism. Both are equally vulnerable and demonstrate the artist’s constant sensibilities; melancholic, nostalgic, utopian, and rich with a classical notion of the sublime. Made with great attention to both the art of drawing and painting, Vanpoucke’s works are simultaneously outspoken and quiet, daring to release a sigh when everything around it seems to scream. As such, Vanpoucke presents a sense of wonder not often seen in current times, finding stillness and beauty precisely where others do not, and making his works perhaps all the more welcome because of it.

Vanpoucke’s works have been exhibited, among others, at Art Brussels, Art Rotterdam, Ballroom Project, Art on Paper (Bozar, Brussels), Gerhard Hofland (Amsterdam), DMW Gallery (Antwerp) and D’apostrof (Meigem).