Johan Heylen
VISAGES
The problem with art today, the Romanian essayist and philosopher Cioran has said, is that art has become at once very easy, and very difficult. Easy, indeed, because today, since Marcel Duchamp and conceptual art, anything can be art, it has long since ceased to be about formal beauty or a form of craftsmanship, - as my college teacher said, art is no longer the superlative of “can” -. Even if one were to believe that the visual arts are fundamentally about images, it is clear that anyone can now effortlessly create attractive and fascinating images with today's technology. We will be inundated with a tsunami of perfect, seductive and enchanting images. And, arguably, also, by too much art. But just because art and image-making have become so easy, art has simultaneously become so difficult. At the end of his life, René Magritte said: 'Je cherchais quelque chose à peindre'. I was looking for something to paint. Indeed: what is worth painting? What deserves a picture? The painter responds with his work. So: amid the wonderfully infinite multiplication of images, and the constant trivialisation of the image, why even bother to paint? What Johan Heylen has to say about this - his answer is here. What is there to see?
Forgive me for finding the titles of the works sometimes very friendly, and not entirely trustworthy: after all, they often refer to “human” feelings and existential experiences.
These immobile, somehow monumental, frontally displayed, isolated figures are not at home in our world. They are not human. What characterises the species that Johan Heylen paints? At first glance, these beings seem somewhat animal-like; the wide mouth that is almost a maw, without a neck or with a wide neck that usually merges directly into the torso, and set apart or high-set eyes, faces without a forehead. But their inhumanity is not animalistic. They stand upright. These figures do not show an earlier, primitive form in evolution, they are not animals on the way to what we are. They are not, I think, reminders of what we have been. They are not animals, but neither are they monsters; they are not deformed, not failed. They depict, I think, a conceptual variant, the scheme of a particular form of “subjectivity”. Because there, in those big bulbous heads, there is certainly a “presence”, there is a form of inwardness, there is “feeling” and a kind of (self-)awareness. They look (back). But it does involve another, a reduced and simplified subjectivity, composed, in varying proportions, of only a limited number of the elements or building blocks of our - the human - subjectivity. Through which nothing really feels alien, but we - I think - do not recognise ourselves either.
First of all, it is striking that the figures usually do have some kind of mouth. And always an eye or eyes - so there is often a gaze, something that breaks through the introspective sunkenness of passively “feeling” oneself, looking outwards, seeking contact. But they have no ears. So the figures look, or they look back, but they hear nothing, and so do not listen. And their mouths are often wide, but thin, just a line, that is, without lips, and usually closed, and sometimes even the mouth seems pinched shut, or sewn shut. They don't speak, they don't shout either, they don't express themselves, they exist - it seems - even before there is language, and have a sense of existence without a “monologue interior”, they have a calm inside.
No ears, but also, mostly, no nose, i.e. they have heads but (only) the beginning of a face: the nose, the centre that marks the middle axis and divides the face exactly into two halves, makes the face regular and symmetrical, is missing. Together with the broad heads with their slightly irregular shape, this suggests that, inside, they are not sharply focused, that is, that there is feeling and awareness, but no “I” - to be an I, you have to be able to say “I”, you have to be able to speak.
Equally remarkable: no lips - perpetual self-touch. And the species is bald, it has no hair. (With a haircut, they would indeed look strange, unlikely.) What it means for them to miss hairdressing is, of course, the question, in disguise, of what head hair, and the constant casual touching of one's own hair (and head), does to us. And that is, in a very specific way, perhaps about the beginnings of going out and going in, it is about expressing oneself and about rubbing and feeling, about groping and feeling closeness, about touch and being touched. However, these creatures have compact, bare, somewhat stocky bodies. They are not vulnerably naked; they simply exist without clothes. They sometimes have sexual characteristics, especially female, which, however, are pasted onto the body as local features, separate, and do not radiate, until the whole body becomes “male” or “female”; the limbs either remain very close to the body or hang, like sprites, powerless or atrophied, on or under the torso. They don't reach out, they don't explore. They are not groping, acting bodies - to act you need hands.
And Heylen paints these figures alone, or when they are together, side by side, with almost no interaction. He consistently paints them against a uniform, always dark background. They exist in a pictorial space, without a setting: they are not anywhere, not in a world where they belong, but neither in a world where they are lost.
Who are these fascinating beings? I think they are balanced on the treshold between inside and outside, in that mysterious zone between what we call inwardness and what the philosophers refer to as 'in-the-world-ness'; I believe they linger at or on that imaginary border crossing - one we do not understand but know all too well, because we constantly pass it by, without ever stopping.
Bart Verschaffel
This essay was originally presented as the opening speech of the exhibition “People on the way”, December 8, 2024.
Published in TheArtCouch, July 30, 2025.
When the theme lifts itself
I don't know if this was ever researched. How does an artist arrive at a theme, which he eventually makes his own to such an extent that it defines him, if not his art? Studies enough on stimulating or nurturing creativity - I immediately think of Ap Dijksterhuis's book Inspiration - but this is not yet how artists “choose” a theme, unless it is the other way around: that the work chooses the artist, as Gustav Jung would roughly put it.
Many artists struggle with this theme of theme. ‘Je cherche quelque chose à peindre,’ stated René Magritte. ‘The subject of my painting is painting itself,’ then again Michaël Borremans said. It typifies the fog that surrounds the theme, the shyness sometimes to even talk about a theme, as if it were only of secondary importance. Presumably it is - or doesn't necessarily have to be - even if the artwork, any artwork, is ultimately about something.
But it need not therefore be a precise subject, or at least not a subject that can be put into words (‘Should I be able to put it into words, I would feel no need to paint,’ is how Edward Hopper put it), and undefinedness itself constitutes a kind of theme - I hope you can still follow.
In his description of Johan Heylen's work, Bart Verschaffel talks about the borderland between internal perception and “being in the world” (Heidegger's Dasein). Not a clearly measured boundary, then, neither identifiable nor identifiable, even though two completely different concepts take place on either side. A wave function of a boundary, to put it in quantum physics terms. This is where he situates Johan's strange creatures: prominent but unmoored; creatures that stare back at the viewer without actually seeing, that perhaps think without thought - or at least without words - and are therefore just thought. From an anthropomorphic reflex, we recognise the nonetheless inhuman figures that exist in themselves, separate from what is known to us.
The awareness that they are present without us being able to attribute an existence to them - that is presumably the theme: the knowledge that there is something, without our frames of reference giving us an indication of what exactly. A latent form of being, which, precisely because it hangs between the human and the unrecognisable, carries a bit of mystery - if not a form of mysticism - within it.
When it becomes the theme, it resolves itself. A fascinating theme in itself.
Frederic De Meyer, TheArtCouch, May 2025.
PEOPLE ON THE WAY
KU Leuven is celebrating its 600th anniversary. Six centuries of groundbreaking research, inspiring education and active engagement in the world will be celebrated with numerous events. Thus the Faculty Club, situated in the historic setting of Leuven's Groot Begijnhof, in collaboration with the Committee on Contemporary Art of the University of Leuven, welcomes Leuven’s artist Johan Heylen, with the exhibition “People on the way”.
“People on the way” can be seen as a metaphor of the life journey of each of us. Ithaca is the destination we all seek, but the true wealth does not lie in reaching her. It is the journey that shapes us, the paths we walk full of dreams, desires, and the lessons of the unknown. Ithaca is not a place, but a promise of fulfilment that always seems just beyond our reach, a mirror of our deepest ambitions and fears. As we wander through life, we realise that it is not about Ithaka itself, but the soul we forge along the way. The quest reveals that we ourselves are the journey, and Ithaka just a horizon that continues to guide us.
The exhibition “People on the way” shows a selection of Johan Heylen's oeuvre. Creatures move under a pale sky, shadows in search of something unnameable. Each pair of feet touches the earth, but their souls float, en route to a place they will never quite reach. The road is long, winding, and the destination constantly changes shape. Wind whispers secrets, but answers remain hidden behind the horizon. Sometimes they intersect, the wind caresses the shadow and the horizon kisses the soul. But in the end, everyone travels alone, searching for a deeper meaning. People on the way to a place that doesn't exist.
Speakers
Professor Stéphane Symons, Professor Bart Geerts, Professor Bart Verschaffel
The silence of the night is enshrined in his paintings
Exhibition "The World of Beckett", Geel, May 2024
In a unique way, Johan is a soul doomed to paint who is looking for the core of existence. You can read in his canvases the importance of life, which is difficult to grasp.
Existential questions come to the fore, they always occupy a prominent place in his canvases. There are also underlying issues of faith, which in turn raise new questions. As with one of his abstract paintings "Dialogue. With God". Nevertheless, the artist seeks and finds inspiration from philosophers, poets and other artists in order to ultimately paint the stillness masterfully. The color palette is dark and murky. Brown and black are always present. Sometimes the paint is mixed with sand and a granular matter is created, which causes a relief to be noticeable in some works. The artist continues to work steadily on what is now a gigantic body of work. He builds this carefully and solidly.
The titles of the artworks are carefully chosen and help the viewer on the right path to what the artist had in mind when creating his canvases. The titles often contain a striking link to the literary world. They refer to writers, concepts, and metaphors. Sometimes they are literal excerpts from, for example, the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett. Beckett is an important source of inspiration for the artist in several ways.
Curator
Kris Cuypers
February 2024
In the labyrinth of metaphysical doubt
Exhibition “Doubt”, BNP Paribas Fortis, Leuven, October 2023
Wittgenstein writes in his posthumously published work 'Über Gewissheit' (no. 160): "The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after faith." In his analytical thinking, this philosopher slaloms along the boundaries between knowledge, certainty, faith and doubt. Doubt occupies a prominent place in philosophical thought, even though uncertainty and doubt have rather degenerated into a sign of weakness in the community. Confucius, on the contrary, called it a "watchdog of insight." Aren't the places in which there is room for nuance, uncertainty, presupposition and doubt increasingly threatened?
Reducing the concept of doubt to not being able to choose between two possibilities, this is too simplistic. Quite apart from the fact that there is usually a multitude of ways, the question remains: is doubt necessarily resolved by a gratuitous decision? Such as a decision under pressure of circumstances, for example. In existential doubt, however, the meaning of one's own existence is the subject of numerous questions and reflections. It deals with fundamental ethics, namely: what should I do? Not in the sense of what is expected of me, but rather: what is in accordance with my inner compass?
In the history of philosophy, of course, we cannot ignore the famous methodical doubt of the seventeenth-century René Descartes. His cogito ergo sum, the I think, therefore I exist, questions everything that can be doubted, to end with the certainty of the very doubting by a subject. Existence, the outside world, God, etc., could be deduced from pure doubt itself. But isn't doubt here merely a means to achieve a basis of certainty? Descartes' universal doubt is a search for a definitive, objective ground of scientific certainty. So it's essentially putting an end to the doubt. This intellectual doubt is quite different from the wrenching doubt of a Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard's work, the experience of doubt is agonizing and oppressive. It is in a frightening ignorance. This nineteenth-century existentialist doubted not only God and Christian truth, but also himself, the meaning of life, his relationship with his father, his studies and so on. This growing doubt prompted him to write down his musings in order to curb the unrest. I quote: "This is what my soul thirsts for, like the deserts of Africa thirst for water. This is what I lack, and that is why I am like a man who has amassed furniture and rented rooms, but has not yet found the beloved who will share with me the ups and downs of life."
In this way, doubt can be a source of creativity. Perhaps even a lack of doubt is a lack of creativity. The process of creation is a constant combination of struggle and entrustment, of passion and doubt. In this way, Johan Heylen allows numerous doubts in his artistic work. The questions that arise in his life about femininity, relationships, finiteness, passion, misunderstanding, sexuality, loneliness, sadness, vulnerability, faith, indeterminacy and lack, they simply belong to our human condition. They are man's. But by wanting to express these sensitivities in a plastic medium, he gives them breathing space, he opens them up, he frees the particular from them in a universally recognizable pallet. If you have sharp eyes, you can also see the cracks in the wall. They are musings that are captured in images.
This emotional, existential doubt stems from deep experiences. Experiences of being on your own when it counts. Or deep sadness in the face of loss. This is something to be taken extremely seriously. Here is a deep ground to break free from your ingrained beliefs of the past. What do you choose? Which story is credible?
But in his artistic outpourings, Johan Heylen goes further than this. The artist himself describes it as a metaphysical doubt. First of all, metaphysics was described by Aristotle in the fifth century B.C.E. as "meta ta physica" (Gr.), i.e., everything that comes after physics. That was how he had arranged his writings. All the questions that remain open after we have painstakingly empirically examined everything, all those other questions about ethics, religion, meaning, politics, the good life, etc., that always remain unanswered. That is the field of metaphysics. It is also true that the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty once described it: "Whether it is my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always how I can be open to phenomena that go beyond me and yet exist only insofar as I take them up and live them." The moment that passes, an insight that surpasses us, Johan Heylen lives through the desire to be able to paint it, to want to visualize it. We may never be able to fully understand what we see appearing, and we don't have to. Spirituality played a crucial role in the birth of modern art. The exploration of inner reality and human consciousness is also an orientation for Johan in his creations. Doubt and rapture are not mutually exclusive. Questions do not arise from the negation of the world, but from the realization that asking is also an action. It is a unique opportunity to come face to face with the riddle of reality. He likes to be inspired by the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart, when he speaks of a path of 'letting go' and 'emptying'. In this view, man must be 'depicted' of his own images.
Without wishing to be guilty of an exhaustive interpretation of Johan Heylen's work, I would like to point out a number of details. In 'The last walk' we see a gloomy head-footer emerging from the darkness. A barely concealed, hollow skull is only slightly connected to the earth with its swollen legs. We return, naked and emptied, to the great nothingness from which we came. More abstract and enigmatic, he designs an idiosyncratic drawing language in 'Study for a funeral'. In a magical square, subdivided into nine squares, we read the experience of a pure figuration that folds and unfurls within the confines of its cave. Here the reference to the tradition of the mythical secret code of lost civilizations predominates. "And with that, the soul bids farewell to the whole world and ascends to its true life in the eternal God," Eckhart wrote. The work 'Corps crucifiés' describes an act of erotic intimacy between two bodies as crucified. This visual association of the act of love as a crucifixion connects the pain of physicality with the ultimate redemption. Alienation and fusion merge into each other. An iconic image within the theme of the exhibition 'Doubt' is the work 'Dream'. In a framework (Bacon or a four-poster bed?) a being dwells in the capacity of an exclamation mark in a night dream. Is life itself no more than a dream? Or what do dreams have to tell us about what the spiritual life hides from us? In this way and in a hermetic style, Johan Heylen designs a visual language that invites us to reflect on our own existence.
Joannes Késenne, PhD in Art Psychology
October 2023
The backworldsmen
Exhibition museum “De Hofstadt”, Diest, October 2022-January 2023; curated by Elise Verhaegen en Olav Grondelaers
Johan Heylen's oeuvre is characterized by mysteriousness and an undefinable sorrow. This causes feelings of melancholy, but also triggers a form of recognition amongst those who are amazed at the absurdity of existence. The artist is inspired by the work of mystics, existentialists and metaphysicians. In addition, poetry is also an important source of inspiration. The incomprehensibility of "Being" and the position of humanity in this mystery is a recurring theme. Creatures walk around aimlessly, with no hope of salvation or forgiveness, ignorant of their guilt, and not understanding their punishment. There is a holy horror, which stems from a radical alienation.
Titles are often extractions of essays by poets and philosophers, referring to this work. For example, the work "Malone meurt" refers to Beckett's novel of the same name. Malone has shaken off all pose and pretense. The situation is insane, the atmosphere is toxic. At the moment of death, in the midst of God's scarcity and not in His abundance, the core of human existence can be laid bare.
The works "Sur le monde" and "Sous le sol" can be seen as a diptych. Both earthly and non-earthly existence is an enigma, a labyrinth without an exit. The creatures are lost, groping and searching.
Despite the substantial adversity portrayed, Johan's work contains a vulnerability and tenderness. Everything is ambiguous, every painting is multi-layered. His work has its own formal language, a sincere idiom of recalcitrance and wonder.
The works succeed in putting their finger on the wordless wound and shifting the attention from the banal material to the mystical unspeakable. Any attempt to put these works into words folly, since the unspeakable cannot be lucidated.
Johan Heylen was born in 1967 and lives and works in Leuven (Belgium). He is passionate about philosophy, poetry, and modern and contemporary sculpture and painting. He is self-taught.
Existentialism solidified in paint
Studio visit to Johan Heylen- The ArtCouch, 2023-2
Une vie, c'est fait avec de l'avenir comme les corps sont faits avec du vide", wrote Sartre in the novel L'âge de raison. The protagonist, philosophy student Mathieu, comes to this realization when he realizes that everyone around him makes life-defining decisions; they move forward, cause their personal future, even if it is indeterminate and meaningless. He himself is entangled in a defined pattern of thinking, full of beliefs that ultimately turn out to be shaky. An existential doubt.
Is there an age limit to this doubt? You might think this would be a privilege for young people. That with age comes more clarity in the usefulness, in the destiny of all this. Not necessarily. Why should it? For the vast majority of our lives, we do not enjoy the freedom to think about such matters, let alone to doubt. Sooner or later, rather late, life holds up a mirror to you, like a reckoning. You come face to face with the possible place you have taken in a larger whole. This thought need not necessarily be gloomy or melancholy, nor is it a "happy science." Everything depends on what you do with this science.
These are reflections that accompany our conversation, while Johan Heylen guides me through his oeuvre. They serve as undertones. The paintings are externalizations of his philosophical quest, afflicted with the absurd and the essential loneliness of man, in the tradition of the existentialists, but also with a profoundly humanistic, almost sacred certainty: somehow all this must have a higher meaning. Each work bears witness to a milestone on this tortuous road, an insight that was whispered to him by the numerous thinkers from the past who accompany him on his path. Together they form the becoming human being, searching, doubting, prey to an existential desolation, but nevertheless on the move, driven by an elusive, incomprehensible necessity. An élan vital that drives every artist to create, even if the significance of this is unprecedented.
There, perhaps, lies the essence of what art is: the freedom to proceed to the act of creation independently of meaning, without rational considerations. The act as an act, as a mere will without a destination. The words of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière accompany me when the door of the studio slams behind me: "art liberates as soon as it no longer wants to liberate us."
Frederic De Meyer
Founder
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