Confirming over the years an intense pictorial expression, painting and drawing give to Bart Baele a very wide emotional reach. Invoking his personal pantheon – Antonin Artaud, Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh, James Ensor, Niko Pirosmani – Bart Baele evokes them as loud incantations, accentuating the tension between satire and drama, pamphlet and fable, that runs through his fascinating work. Reworked over months, even years, Bart Baele summons his inner torments and transcribes them as the most sensitive seismographer would do. These quotations amplify an emotional charge from which the viewer cannot escape. The theatricality of existence takes on its full dimension here. For it is indeed the theatre of life, whose main actors, coming from the artist’s life are often represented by the animal genre, which can take the form of birds (good and innocent) or wolfs (evil). And if these animals are far from the personifications of La Fontaine, here they symbolize as much human suffering as hypocrisy, and also and especially the hope that Bart Baele seems to hold in humanity. © Schönfeld