2017
(...)Tinus Vermeersch operates in the art historian context of the Flamish late Gothic, Renaissance and early Barock, focusing on the permanent, irrational and de-stabilizing transfiguration of apparently banal motives from the nature and everyday’s life, creating in this way subversive sensual metaphors of uncertainty and improbability. His subtle drawings and paintings open a hidden universe of small, almost unvisible, unnoticed realities, which reveal tremendous, deeply disturbing, almost frightening perspectives of unlimited obscurity where irrational, inexplicable, unsolvable processes and forces are shaping our world. The horror of the unknown, the shock of the obscure are appearing in a retarded, indirect, silent way, so that the real confrontation with the shocking power of uncertainty enters in our mind slowly, inevitably, unavoidably.(...)
Lorand Hegyi
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2016
The work of Tinus Vermeersch, a young Belgian painter descended from three generations of artists, recalls a Flemishpastoral landscape tradition in wich the accasional strangeness found in Breughel's paintings is distilled into pared-down scenes. Working in oil on board, Vermeersch begins with a gesso ground, whose imprimatura shows through multiple layers of translucent oil paint as vertical lines dragged by his brush, producing e texture resembling rays of light. The most common form in his repertoire is a wig-like shape with matted locks he calls 'tegumen', after the Latin word for covering or 'protection'. Reminicent of carwash brushes, the organic form first featured in Vermeersch's work in 2010 and since reappeared in various sizes and materials, including plaster and bronze.
The tegumen features in the new dreamlike works here (all Untitled, 2015), where it manifests in one painting as a shape resembling a haystack and in another as a sort of dreadlocked cocoon from wich a pear of human legs protrude. Elsewhere, green brushstrokes coalesce to form a bulky torso tropped by a loosely painted oval, less a distinct face than a pareidolic arrangment of brushstrokes. The works hang on walls painted in faded khaki and goldgreen, wich set off the rich vermillion and red lake pigment in several paintings. A pair of brown ink drawings in an adjecent room act as studies of the tegumen's structure: ammesh frame with locks of hair tied at regular intervals. It's a painstaking analysis of this recurring motif, recalling the precision of the strange bestiary found in the works of early Flemish masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel the Elder. (...)
Ellen Mara De Wachter (Frieze Magazine, fragm. Around Town: Brussels Belgium)
2015
Still in his thirties, Tinus Vermeersch lives in the present day, drives his car while listening to the radio, doesn’t paint by candlelight and, as far as we know, no longer believes in the devil or hell. Quite simply, he is evolving in another dimension; one that is impervious to the assault of time or the shams of the contemporary world. This feat is only within reach of a few exceptionally gifted dreamers. He is neither ancient nor modern (he couldn’t resist the jubilation of hurling the following quip at one of his colleagues, a French painter: “I see so many artists - painters, sculptors - running after modernity... last I heard, they were still running”). Tinus himself runs after nothing, neither hypothetical modernity nor his great Flemish ancestors. He follows his own imagination. Calmly, he gives shape to the dictates of his subconscious. Slowly, meticulously, intensely. He produces little; by nature he is indifferent to the commercialism of his times. He is simply guided, step by step, by his instincts. His work only reached our galleries about ten years ago.
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2013
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Vortex
Tinus Vermeersch's work is a dilightful, honest and confrontational anomaly in a more than fragmented art scene, where the choices museums currently make are based increasingly on the judgements based on the tastes of cultural decision-makers, wich are frequently infected by the interests of the art market, by the gradual crumbling of 'authority' in the discourse and good-quality reporting on art, and obove all by the rize of blogs, by writers for whom this is a flexible and accessible medium. Prejudices and opinions are now intermingled and this has the nice advantage that it no longer remains entirely dependent on museums or, more importantly, on the associated art market powered by high finance. Through the 'close-up' view, a fragile, intimate artwork wich a priori does not need much distance and space around it gains the viewer's empathy. At a time when we are overrun by the media, this sort of artwork is a courageous act of resistance against the alienation of our goal-oriented, docile and fleeting perception of an artwork. Tinus Vermeersch's oeuvre is not directly derived from the world that currently spins before our eyes.
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2007
Around 1515 Albrecht Dürer made a woodcut depicting a rhinoceros. He never saw the beast with his own eyes, but he received a written description and a amateurish sketch from someone of the first rhinoceros imported to Europe via Portugal. The depiction of the rhinoceros was bizarre and unrealistic, coulered by Dürer imagination and the exaggerations in the description. Moreover, there was no iconography yet to depict such an exotic animal. Nevertheless, the strange animal stirred the imagination of Europeans and the woodcut became very popular. Until the end of the 18th century, Dürer's interpretation was experienced as true-to-life and other depictions of the rhinoceros were based on that of the German master.
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2005
Tinus Vermeersch makes small drawings in sepia and other colours that evoke peculiar, foreign, sureal and fancifull scenes that no more or less leave behind a far echo of old painting, with Breughel and Bosch as formal references. When one looks more closely, Tinus' drawings can be read as extremely sensetive "notes" of dreams and impressions that do not ( or no longer) correspond to this world. Or don't they?
Those who look carefully notice that Tinus Vermeersch gives life's great themes a chance via compositions that sometimes deal with live in a wry way.
Luc Lambrecht