Dirk De Cock

Born in 1953 in Zottegem, works and lives in Deurne (B)

About the Artist

Dirk De Cock  studied Interior design at the Higher Saint Lukas Institute in Brussels. He continued drawing and painting at the city academies of Tienen, Leuven and Antwerp. 

The work of Dirk De Cock allows you to enter a world between reality and fiction. The artist uses real visual elements to create a fictional overall picture, it is contemplative, it seeks stillness and evokes a vast desolation as well.

Nature, and certainly the landscape, is without any doubt an important element in his work, though not the depiction of the landscape is important to him, it’s function as a scenery, stripped of all details and  boiled down to the essence creates iconic images.

Although his work tends towards a dystopia, it never is gruesome or moralising. The atmosphere is rather “Unheimlich”, sometimes even fairytale-like and certainly melancholic. The peculiar colour palette, the image cut-out and the central, often static structure of the work reinforce this atmosphere.

The source  usually comes from photographs; own photos, photos from magazines or internet. The artist combines this material, redraws it, omits parts, distorts... They are visual elements we all recognise, but combining them differently, by distorting them and placing them in a new context, the artist invites us to look at them in a different way.

The work of Dirk De Cock is silent and without action, as if nothing is happening……...  Sometimes you can feel the human presence,  but characters are never visible. The concept of time is an important element but it remains unclear whether the scenery is set today or in the past or it is an image of a distant future. The present, the past and the future intertwine with one other in the same frame. Time is being used in different layers in the same image.