JEAN DE GROOTE

Jean De Groote ( 1955) is primarily a painting philosopher, or perhaps it’s the other way around: a philosophizing painter? His large canvases are translations of a way of thinking, a visual quest to see, look at, and understand the world around us. In his oeuvre, “things come into being,” as philosopher Eric Bolle puts it. Their most banal form of existence is transformed by Jean into objects with a sacred meaning, rendered in oil on canvas. He searches for the small, for “even the least still proves to be something; nothing is insignificant.” For forty years, he has been quietly and steadily building a coherent, contemplative body of work from his monastic cell in Nazareth.

UNTITELD, 2025