As a Belgian television presenter and producer, Vanoudenhoven has been in the public eye for decades. But behind the scenes, he’s always been a visual artist as well. From painting with the late Dutch artist Herman Brood to assembling collages of magazine cut-outs, Vanoudenhoven had secretly been cultivating his passion for art on the side.
“Brood taught me that I didn’t need to go to an art academy to express myself artistically,” he says. “It’s something that comes from within you, an escape from the real world, the freedom to only think about your creation.”
The COVID-19 pandemic gave him a chance to bring his canvasses to the foreground. For the first time in 2021, Vanoudenhoven publicly showed his art in a series of exhibitions in Belgium, culminating at the Verbeke Foundation in Kemzeke. Since then, his works have appeared in several exhibitions, including at galleries in Oostende and Brussels. “In Nomine” at Sablon d’Art in Brussels is the latest and “Nom de Dieu: Criticism, Blasphemy, Satire …?” at Vrije Universiteit Brussel with world-renowned visual artist Wim Delvoye will be November 2024 to February 2025.
Vanoudenhoven’s visual art is about refining the unrefined with unusual mixed media. He uses his vast collection of paper cuts and objects with paint and often epoxy to create highly original artworks, statements on societal issues and sometimes optical illusions as well as visual humour. Take, for example, Christ measuring the clouds with a ruler. He has the right as the conduit between humanity and God, unlike an ordinary man. Dried rose petals surrounding a metallic body of Christ suggest that his values live, but ours have fallen, including lost focus on climate change. With collages of paper hair, Vanoudenhoven infers that we are not separate pieces, rather one “peace” of humanity made of many colors and styles.
He also transforms raw, gritty images or materials into noble presentations, putting them in another context. Take, for example, porn magazines. He literally cuts out their vulgarity by artfully arranging paper cuts in geometric shapes like fishnet or Cubism. “Skin Hunger,” for example, made up of isolated circles of different skin colours like floating virus particles, speaks to the longing for human touch that many people felt during the pandem
“I like geometric forms and the repetition of patterns as they give peace through containment or predictability,” says Vanoudenhoven.
Other artworks create a trick of the eye or optical illusion, such as a geometric abstraction created from paper cuts of desert landscapes or a large cross appearing from a distance among rose petals, paperclips or photo paper fish eyes. These pieces jolt viewers into thinking twice about how they perceive things.
Vanoudenhoven also uses ordinary objects to create striking artworks, such as thousands of unravelled paperclips strategically arranged, hundreds of coloured pins stuck into a Styrofoam head or broken Christmas ornaments arranged like Sanskrit language or computer code. Such works prove that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, depending on what we do with it and how we view it. They inspire us have gratitude for even the most basic of things.
Recovering objects from nature or recycling depots, such as dried palm fronds and plastic “shrapnel,” Vanoudenhoven embellishes some of his artworks with sustainable beauty. They combine with other materials to be abstract, surreal or allegorical. For instance, he transforms a palm frond and photo paper into an ethereal horse face.
On television and now in his art, Vanoudenhoven is also known for humour. For example, he depicts Jesus descending through the clouds via a parachute made of ladies’ legs and bums. In “St. Cecilia’s Choir,” he shows multiple women with orgasmic expressions in a choral arrangement as if universally singing an ode to joy.
“In art, I have complete freedom to do whatever I want and the peace of mind of unhindered creativity,” Vanoudenhoven says. “It’s the reverse commute of television; instead of being a public figure inside private homes, I’m making my private works available to the public. It’s telling a story in a different way.”
The creativity of Vanoudenhoven, known humourously on Instagram as @RobertScissorman, is always expressed in mixed media, dominated by non-traditional materials, and often in collages. Traditional, wooden or even metallic “canvases” provide durable surfaces and glossy epoxy gives many works elegance and longevity.