Nature pervades every artistic medium Cathérine Claeyé explores, inspiring her to create imaginary worlds that offer a sense of refuge – from immersive paintings to compelling site-specific projects.

Video, performance and theatre design are other avenues, yet painting remains her primary focus. Through a dynamic interplay of format and composition, colour and brushstroke, she transforms landscape, floral and botanical motifs into a spatial experience of sensual materiality.

“Cathérine Claeyé’s paintings are always on the edge of everything and nothing, of the seemingly silly and the sublime. She knows how to create a great tension between the material components of the painting and the virtual space of the image, between the real and the imaginary, the literal and the possible. This gives her paintings a great evocative power and a particular vulnerability, a childlike playfulness and an existential charge. Perhaps we could call this tension between something and nothing, this concrete materiality in relation to this sparkling, fragile, fleeting beauty, ‘erotic’.” Frank Maes, Emergent Gallery, Veurne, (B)