Galeria Nuno Centeno is pleased to announce the opening of Philippe Van Snick’s Natureza Dinâmica. This i s the artist’s second exhibition in Portugal at Galeria Nuno Centeno.
The Belgian artist Philippe Van Snick (1946) is one of the precursors of conceptual art in Belgium in the early seventies.
Fascinated by the conceptual art of that time, Van Snick started to examine patterns in cosmic logic and in daily life which led him t o develop formulas and cipher codes that would later result in the use of his decimal colour system and the concept of duality in various forms.
Van Snick considers painting to be much more than just the painted surface. The forms, objects and colours that he uses never stand alone. They are intimately related to the space in which they are situated and the physical experience of the viewer.
His practice includes painting, public art, sculptures, work on paper and editions.

Over the course of a career that has spanned more than four decades, Philippe Van Snick has remained committed to a specific set of aesthetic terms, including a palette of ten colours. Returning to these colours and using them in subtly different iterations has enabled him to produce an exceptionally wide range of visual and sculptural forms. Through a careful use of the photographic image and abstraction, the work has staged productive confrontations between apparently irreconcilable terms such as day and night, East and West, nature and culture. The resulting conceptual and aesthetic friction invites the viewer to supplement their appreciation of Van Snick’s work with an attitude of openness and receptivity to the beauty of everyday elements.

– Ellen Mara De Wachter

Natureza Dinâmica shows next to historical pieces a new body of works: Nature, 2018 and Spring, 2018.
In these new series all elements o f Van Snick’s visual language are present, but in a new form of appearance. These series contain both its decimal coloured system, light blue and black (representing day and night) from the past. Through a system that represents infinity or unlimitedness, he can express that the world (nature) is one big entity that consists of endless possibilities. Recently he started working with organic forms that led to these new series of paintings.
Dinâmica stands for nature’s forces such a s light and dark, the explosion of colour in all its intensity over the different canvases, organic forms, which have to be interpreted by the viewer himself.
These forms represent the intuitive, the unexpected of life which can g o i n all directions, positive and negative.
Philippe Van Snick (b. 1946, Ghent, Belgium) lives and works in Brussels and has been shown at the 48th Venice Biennale and at numerous institutions, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Centre National d’art Contemporain de Grenoble; and Museum M Leuven.
His work is held i n the collections of MoMa, (NY); MU.ZEE, (BE); M HKA, (BE); S.M.A.K, (BE); D e Bruin-Heijn (NL); among others private and corporate collections in Europe, USA and Japan.