HAPPY HOUR | Thé Van Bergen

Thé van Bergen is a painter born in 1946 in Achterveld (Netherlands), whose work is part of a continuous reflection on the very conditions of painting. Active between the Netherlands and Belgium, he has been developing a coherent body of work since the 1970s, centered not on the representation of a subject, but on the pictorial act as a process. In his work, painting is never a simple means of illustration. It becomes a space of experimentation where tensions between control and chance, construction and erasure, gesture and revision are played out. The paintings of van Bergen retain the visible traces of their elaboration: successive layers, coverings, accidents, and modifications participate fully in the final image. The work thus reveals its own becoming, as if the time of creation remained inscribed in the surface. His pictorial language is based on often simple and recurring forms; fragments of bodies, architectural structures, refined landscapes, or isolated objects; which do not seek to tell a story. These motifs function rather as open anchor points, leaving the viewer the freedom to associate, interpret, or project meaning. The narrative is never imposed: it remains fragmentary, suggested, always in suspense. Through this approach, his work is situated in a dynamic of permanent research. It does not fix itself in a definitive style but evolves through series, variations, and repetitions. For Chez Thé van Bergen, painting thus amounts to keeping a question open: that of what painting can still be today.