Albert Pepermans - The pleasure of painting

 

“Ça suffit”? This laconic title is from Albert Pepermans himself. It interrogates: ‘Is it enough?’. While working on a piece, Pepermans asks himself this very question, anxious to stop at the right moment. Is it enough? This in no way means that he has ended his career as an artist, or that he plans to stop his artistic practice. It is 2022 and he has not taken his foot off the gas. Energetic, impertinent, direct, impulsive, rebellious, raw, powerfully handling color. These characteristics emerge from his work, whether figurative or abstract, as well as a certain modesty and melancholy. His paintings and performances are rooted in the turbulent 60’s: Pop Art, anarchist events and rock 'n' roll. An admirer of Dada, underground comics and, later, of the New Fauves like Baselitz and Immendorf, he is strongly attracted to the anarchy of punk, that ephemeral explosion of the late 70’s. The raw energy of rock 'n' roll and the brutality of punk never completely disappeared from his work. He is often labeled a "painter”, but ordinary brushes and ordinary canvases are rarely, if ever, part of his arsenal of materials. His medium of choice is paper. In the 1980s, he gained an international reputation with largescale works, often realized on extremely fine sewing pattern paper, with brutal figurative representations and sharp visions of characters in an urban environment. Ça suffit?