YVES BEAUMONT  (° 1970, lives and works in Ostend).

Yves Beaumont belongs to a generation of 'silent painters', painters who work on the secular theme of landscape painting.

His visual language is clearly related to classical landscape painting, but shows a contemporary translation of it. It exudes modesty and stillness. Starting from visible reality, a landscape element, he reduces, adds and paints away, until the real poetry of painting itself remains. Images with a silent force emerge, which sometimes penetrate the viewer quite a long time later. His ethereal landscapes are memories and also statements. When the viewer continues to look at Yves Beaumont's landscapes, he observes that the painterly is convincingly in the foreground, but that there is nevertheless also a subcutaneous graphic arrangement present.  The artist depicts the subtle evocation of a highly individual 'état d'âme' that refers to reality as the bearer of feelings and expression. The viewer is captured by the silent power that emanates from the images. His work exudes modesty and tranquillity. Above the aesthetic of the painting Yves Beaumont suggests something else and leaves the viewer free to experience it on his own. 

"In his work, sensory, sensitive perception is tactile: the design is one of suspicion, the colouring is restrained and deliberately applied in an attempt to transcend reality, "his" reality. (K.Dierickx)

Yves Beaumont studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and was taught there, among others, by Karel Dierickx, Marc Maet, Jean Bilquin and Werner Cuvelier, In the first following years he obtained a number of important selections and distinctions in competitions for visual arts of provincial and national importance, and his work was thus noticed quite early on and incorporated into the policy of a number of contemporary art galleries. Already in 1995 he was awarded a solo exhibition at the Ostend Museum of Fine Arts. After that, his work was conceived by various curators in a number of projects at home and abroad, and was regularly shown individually by a number of well-known galleries in Flanders and the Netherlands. Works by Yves Beaumont are included in the collections of, among others, the Province of West Flanders, the Belgian Ministry of the Interior, the Mu.Zee in Ostend, the Belgian Embassy in Vietnam, the Flemish Parliament and the Stichting Beeldende Kunst Amsterdam. Yves Beaumont had a large solo exhibition at the Museum van Deinze and the Leiestreek in Deinze (B).  Important group exhibitions for which his participation was requested included the exhibition "Trapped Reality" in Barcelona (Spain), the group presentation with a number of Belgian artists in the BASF-Kulturhaus in Schwarzheide/Dresden (Germany), "Memory and Desire" in The Hague. Beaumont's work has also been presented several times in recent years at important art fairs (including Art Brussels, Art Rotterdam, Art Amsterdam, Art Athens, Art The Hague).  In 2017 Uitgeverij Snoeck published the book "Omzwervingen", an extensive publication that sheds light on his oeuvre of the last ten years.