walking on water
without ever reaching the horizon
P.H. Jen is the artistic alter ego of Philippe Vereenooghe (born 1972). He is a visual artist who lives and works in Otegem, a rural village in the province of West Flanders. His vivid imagination, together with the unconditional love and support of his mother, who was also artistically gifted, eventually led him to the KASK in Ghent, where he completed a four-year degree in painting. His pseudonym is a tribute to his mother.
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P.H. Jen is prolific in several artistic disciplines, such as drawings and paintings on oil-treated canvas and paper. His installations and sculptures are equally interesting. P.H.Jen draws his inspiration from what is happening and influencing his life at any given time. The artist’s oeuvre is marked by a certain degree of naivety, which should be seen as an unprejudiced, albeit slightly rationalized openness. His colour palette is rich, soft and mostly restrained, apart from a few exceptions.
P.H.Jen’s work seems like an eternal balancing act between poetic intimism and vivid expressionism. His earlier figurative work is inhabited by women from his fantasy world who stare at the beholder with their eyes wide open. They somehow reflect how the artist looks at the world or rather at himself. His innermost self and spiritual concerns are his primary sources of inspiration.
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Even in his more expressionist works, the artist is looking for balance, how ever contradictory this may seem. His paintings excel due to their expressive power and universal language of colours, lines, forms and structures. They vaguely refer to the Art Brut, the Latemse School and painters, such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard Giorgio Morandi, Gaston Chaissac, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Without a shadow of doubt, P.H.Jen’s work is marked by integrity and authenticity.
P.H.Jen refers to his own work as “Walking on water without ever reaching the horizon”.​
Discover his work at Art gallery Vereenooghe, Kustlaan 124 Knokke-Heist.