Astral Realm I, 2026 (detail)
Lode Laperre
Paintings built up from many layers of acrylic, then cut, scraped and cracked open again until what lies beneath becomes legible: a fusion of Eastern and Western visual languages.
Works
Lode Laperre paints the way time works on a wall: by covering and uncovering. He lays acrylic paint on the canvas in layer upon layer, then turns on his own work with knives and tools, cutting into it, forcing it to crack, scraping and peeling until what lies beneath comes back into view. Step back and the canvas reads as an abstract image; come close and it becomes a relief, so tactile that it verges on sculpture, and so full of buried marks that one critic called his paintings palimpsests, texts written over older texts. The current that runs beneath it all began in 1998, on a first journey to South-East Asia. Laperre has gone back every year since, and the meeting of East and West, of the cosmic and the earthly, the whole and the detail, has become the story his paintings keep telling.
On view at PAN Amsterdam 2026, stand 85, 31 Oct – 8 Nov 2026
© Lode Laperre. Courtesy of the artist and Crossover Gallery
My paintings have become so tactile and rich in texture that they almost become sculptures.
Lode Laperre
Biography
Lode Laperre (b. 1966, Kortrijk, Belgium) makes paintings that sit on the border between painting and sculpture. He builds each canvas up from many layers of acrylic paint and then works it over again with incisions, forced craquelure, scraping and cutting, so that earlier layers surface through the later ones. What reads as an abstract image from a distance becomes, up close, a relief that can be read like a text; the art critic Willem Elias described his paintings as palimpsests.
Trained in fine arts in Brussels, Laperre won the Kulturama National Prize for Painting in 1990 and had his first solo exhibition in Tournai two years later. A first journey to South-East Asia in 1998 set the course of his work: he has returned to Asia at least once a year since, and the fusion of Western and Eastern visual languages, and with it of the cosmic and the earthly, the whole and the detail, has become the central current in his painting. Alongside the canvases he makes ink drawings on paper and paint sculptures, the Coprolites: residues of painting sessions that he calls the fossil excrements of his paintings.
His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Museum Gevaert-Minne in Sint-Martens-Latem and the Trakart Cultural Centre and Museum in Plovdiv, in group exhibitions at the Museum of Deinze and the Leie Region, which has included his work in presentations of its permanent collection, and at fairs including PAN Amsterdam, KunstRAI, Art Taipei and Art Beijing. Monographs on his work include Pictorion (2016), Naevus (2019), Eidolon (2022) and Infinity (2023). His paintings are held in private and public collections in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea, among other countries.
Selected exhibitions
- 2025 — [D] C N S T R C T, Museum Gevaert-Minne & Crypte, Sint-Martens-Latem (solo)
- 2024 — Emile Claus – Prince of Luminism, Mudel – Museum of Deinze and the Leie Region, Deinze (group)
- 2023 — Triennial GIST, Shifting Sceneries, Zenne valley (group)
- 2023 — Stille Levens, Venetiaanse Gaanderijen, Ostend (group)
- 2019 — ART NRD, Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen (group)
- 2018 — SynAESTHETICS, Trakart Cultural Centre & Museum, Plovdiv (solo)
- 2018 — Zomer van Antwerpen, Zomerfabriek, Antwerp (solo)
- 2016 — Biennale of Painting, Museum of Deinze and the Leie Region, Deinze (group)
- 2016 — Pictorion, Maaltebruggekasteel, Ghent (solo)
- 2013 — anneXXus – review 2013 > 1988, Maaltebruggekasteel, Ghent (solo)
Publications
- Infinity, texts by Joy Lai and Rui Guerreiro, Per van der Horst Gallery, Taipei, 2023
- Eidolon, text by Jean Paul Van Bendegem, Poespa Productions, 2022
- Naevus, texts by Pauline Doutreluingne and Wim Lammertijn, De Gebeten Hond, 2019
- Pictorion, texts by Etienne Vermeersch, Joannes Késenne, Willem Elias and others, ABO, 2016