Artists

Matthieu Ronsse

Press release

Galerie Templon launches its new season with the first solo exhibition by Belgian painter Matthieu Ronsse within its Brussels premises. A singular figure on the Belgian contemporary art scene, Matthieu Ronsse has, for over two decades, cultivated an organic and uninhibited painterly practice. His work seamlessly weaves together abstraction and figuration, classical references and contemporary gestures, in a jubilant and unrestrained approach to form. The exhibition brings together a previously unseen selection of around twenty paintings of various formats. Titled Hotel Prado—in reference to a local hotel in his neighbourhood in Ostend, the Belgian coastal city where he lives and works—the show offers a fleeting fragment of Ronsse’s intimate universe: a slice of life unveiled for a few weeks within the gallery’s walls. The artist transforms the exhibition space into an extension of his studio, where chaos is transfigured into visual poetry. Ghostly figures, fragments of memory, and gestural traces converge on the surface of the canvas, bearing witness to an ongoing process—art in a constant state of flux, resisting all fixity. Ronsse’s oeuvre unfolds as an expansive pictorial discourse in which experimentation and the sheer joy of creation hold centre stage. His paintings embrace incompletion. None of his exhibitions is ever static; transformations may occur over time, revealing a dynamic and fluid approach to making. For the artist, the finished image is not the goal—what truly matters is the ongoing act of creation. Each painting becomes simultaneously a surface, a trace, and a tool: it is its own palette, bearing the imprints of its making and the deliberate accidents that infuse it with raw, intuitive energy.