Monograph English Language

 

Stephan Tessely, Flemish Art Painter

by

Dr. H. Vandenbosche en Marcel De Backer

 

Foreword

by Dr. H. Vandenbossche

Stephaan Tessely, large and lanky, a blue-brown voice, a blond beard that makes him look older than he is; mostly a dreamer and calmly silent, sometimes exploding in a temper, exceptionally being hard as stone when he lets his sarcasm loose on something that strikes him as being an injustice; someone who doesn't consider himself as 'called' but who, with an enormous talent screams out his love and tenderness in the middle of the fire and fury of a brutal world in a vibrating orgy of colors and in a hot-blooded canvases of a splendidly desolate beauty.

Although Tessely the man exudes a certain calm, one can feel the creature instinct trembling inside him; one is almost tangibly confronted with an overdose of living energy and vitality sufficient to fill several lives which converts itself into a visual imaginative power to which he gives a free rein in order to release the pressure of this emotionally charged energy.

Just a sketch, a summary, but surely an incomplete picture of the rich personality of the artist who we present. Why such an incomplete picture? Why not a curriculum vitae with reminiscences going back to his childhood? Because we believe that it isn't so important to know everything about an artist nor to sum up his life chronologically. It is more important to understand the ideas and feelings expressed in a work of art, to catch the inner emotions that inspired the painter at the moment when he created his work of art.

This collection therefore serves primarily to confront you with the art of Stephaan Tessely and less with Stephaan Tessely the artist.

Every artist more or less feels an internal confusion in himself, a confusion that is nothing more than the anxiety for the late that awaits him, the destiny that only very late or only after his death becomes fully known. The only question of concern here is whether of not his creative energy answers the ideals of his time. And who can answer that? Who else but living human beings, the people, you yourself? The great majority of the public doesn't concern itself with the deeper meaning of art. Most of us are more or less familiar with certain techniques, periods, styles or artists but further than this we have only suspicions and ideas, not true knowledge and concrete understanding. Maybe this will come, since the fervour of living through our own love and sorrow, perhaps unconsciously, forms the center of our sphere of interests. And with this point of view, it will not be so much the definition of what art is that will serve as a measuring stick but it will be, above all, conditioned by a simple comparison between the work of art and reality as we see it or rather… dream it.

This process of visual acquaintance with a work of art, the finding of the way in the endless labyrinth of art becomes increasingly more difficult due to, among other reasons, the lack of museums for gifted contemporary artists.

The only possibility to offer you the opportunity to invade the poetic but often tormented world of Tessely was the publication of this book of reproductions. It is primarily intended as an illustration of the intense virtuosity of this still young artist and further for the orientation of the numerous art-lovers. Painting is universal, not bound by a language, above all Tessely is a globetrotter. It was therefore imperative that this monograph be multilingual.

We have endeavored to work towards a succint clarity, choosing primarily a visual path, while we felt permitted to fill in and enrich the reproductions with a responsible choice of poetry. The art of Tessely stands close to poetry indeed. Only a combination of both can, according to our modest judgement create a total image sphere wherein beauty will triumph…

 

Saint-Martin's-Latem

Blessed Region of Flemish Art

 

Saint-Martin's Latem is a typical Flemish village, a symbol in this region of art. It is the soul of a whole country, of Flanders; a radiant summit of different conceptions of life. It also is a centre of life and art, an elect place for dreaming. Indeed, the small village once was the capital of modern art, the spirit of which enlighted time and space. A quick glance at the artistic evolution at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century will be convincing.

To draw up the inventory ~ even a universal one ~ of every remarkable achievement in painting and sculpture nowadays, it is absolutely necessary to take into account the old artistic country of Flanders, without neglecting Latem. This is the critical opinion of art-lovers all over the world.

Jean Cassou, who is well acquainted with the universal artistic life of our days, calls Latem a Flemish village on the banks of the river Lys, well informed about world art, that for generations was the theatre of different artistic tendencies and styles, testifying an inexhaustible creative mind with a people that always served art so brilliantly.

All this makes Latem to a place as famous in history of civilization as Barbizon or Pont-Aven, a spot on earth gathering an immense human activity and a creative mind.

The art-lover wanting to be well informed goes and meets Ensor and Spilliaert in Ostend, Van Rijselberghe in Ghent, De Braeckeleer, Strobbaerts and Daeye in Antwerp, J. Smith in the Campine, R. Wouters in Malines, Evenepoel, Brusselmans, Tytgat and others in Brussels. But he will certainly not omit taking a long walk along the Lys, about Deurle-Latem. This blessed country adds a pinch of salt to the dull daily round.

Here passions are not repressed, but life is enjoyed frankly and freely. Everywhere one meets Uilenspiegel, Lamme Goedzak and Nele.

Without forgetting to worship God, the forbidden fruit is eaten eagerly, till its sweet juice drips down the cheeks.

 

A monograph about an artist may be conceived in many different ways. Some essayists will prefer to describe simply the artist's life and to trace briefly, by means of their pen, each of his works. Some will stick to a inventory of his creations, or to a careful compilation of earlier articles and criticisms.

Others will study more or less thoroughly the whole contemporary art production and they will try to class their artist in the maze of schools, of-isms, that such a synchronic view usually offers. Many of them start from preconceived theories and force them upon the work like a Sunday-suit. Why such methods are out of the question with Tessely, will be shown further in this monograph.

Finally some will put the main accent on a critical appreciation of each work of art. For this procedure we think Tessely too young, too engaged in a process of growth.

For a final judgment on this work in full development it is far too early. In its turn this monograph will evoke the image of our time, but then as the necessary medium for Tessely's work, as the sound-board against which it reverberates.

We'll try to suggest what is running over and resounding in us, how it continues to vibrate, enriching man's mind, and what is its true significance for our time.

With an artist like Tessely it is better not to adopt a learned tone: that too may become evident in the following pages. We prefer to typify this curious personality through some characteristic anecdotes and the atmosphere of his work.

If we want to class the typical individual Tessely under a school or -ism, with their programmes and manifestoes, we shall betray him and his work, rather than we might give him his due.

The only school to which this landscapist could and in fact should be reckoned, is that of

St.-Martens-Latem. And this is exactly a school of artists that have never grouped themselves on merely theoretical grounds: it existed and still does exist accidentally, simply by its localisation in the Flemish landscape of the Lys.

Indeed, the most outstanding critics of art underlined so many times already, that there was no question of a conscious grouping in a 'School of Latem' by its representatives themselves.

We find among them the most various kinds of artists, who settled down in Latem, and also in Deurle, who met there and in their turn attraced others.

This still happens to-day: a visit to one of their collective exhibitions, regularly reflecting Latem's artistic life, suffices to be convinced that their achievements differ widely in value and level.

Nevertheless, as soon as we agree on the right or wrong interpretation of the term 'school', the significance of Latem in the national, and even in the international artistic life, cannot be denied or neglected.

The beauty of the region, its typical atmosphere and character, mark and determine its artists ineffaceably: its spirit breathes through their works, wherever in this world they might wander about.

In that sense the painter Tessely belongs to that 'School of Latem', even when he was roving in many other places for a long time.

A maggot gnaws at the landscape of the Lys, disturbing its beauty: its name is 'motor-car. Car-parks disturb the beauty of our cities. Could an easier place be chosen than over a sluggish river?

In the country the landscape's beauty is parcelled out.

In earlier days Nevele, Deurle, Latem were at half a day's distance from town, today only ten minutes. A ring of bungalows with garage develops about the big cities. It is becoming desperately difficult to enjoy nature's beauty without a car!

The Lys has been worshipped more than any other river.

Her beauty has been depicted on thousands of canvasses. One should not necessarily be a prophet to assure that there will always be artists who will overlook how the region is being lotted out and who will not see the bungalows. They will go on admiring the sluggish meanders of the Lys, her pastures, cows, trees, the distant horizons, the quiet or dramatic heavens, the mysterious or poetical atmospheres.

Tessely is one of them, but it is difficult to guess when you do not know. He loves the landscape of the Lys with all his soul and heart, but he will never confess more than a

,,Well, yes…''

He is tall and thin, wearing a rough beard. I'd call his bright eyes almost lonely, because far away from him, I can scarcely recall his nose or mouth or ears. He is ,,all eyes'' to me. I do not know the aspect of his hands. Once I told him: ,,Stephaan, I'd like to see you at work!''. He looked frightened and answered quickly: ,,Oh no, that is impossible!''.

I do not know any more about his studio: I never saw a brush or a tube of colour of his. He wants to be alone to work.

When he cannot work because he does not succeed or because he is not in the mood or for any other reason, he phones up many times and grumbles that it can't be done. At that moment he realizes his loneliness. Then he wants to be surrounded by friends, to feel happy. But when the colours obey willingly, you hear not a word from him. He withdraws in his studio, alone, but happy with his passionate love of the Lys, the landscape, its people and animals.

Tessely, like any other artist, feels that inexpressible impulsion that forces him to realize in concrete matter what stirs him inwardly. This is the source of the poetry that inspires most of his paintings.

To be delivered from that impulsion he has to withdraw in loneliness. For a while he does not bear his surroundings too well any more. The others' presence disturbs the deliverance of that accumulated energy of inspiration, hinders the ripe fruit from being released. On that point Tessely is very touchy.

A large painting will bring the solution, a painting of which at first one does not see the edges. Only when the work is finished, its limits become clear.

To live the life of an artist, a man should save much of the child in him:

otherwise he could not link the fat and the lean years of life's chain. He must often live with the hope of being understood one day. He knows dark despair when people pass his work inattentively. One day he feels like a king, another day he thinks himself a complete failure, even unable to load hay.

Sometimes the colours talk and sing. It will be enough to grasp a tube of colour, to adjust a touch of the brush or a stroke with the knife, to succeed. The painting grows in rest, depth or poetry, or else it may become more restless and dramatic. That is when it opens a new window on the artist's universe. When the colours are recalcitrant, obstinate, cross, the painting remains a piece of canvas in a frame.

To live the life of an artist, a man should be in essence a little queer. But even he, who realizes that and is well on his guard, will regularly be flabbergasted by Tessely's peculiarities.

Tessely suddenly decides to go to America. People abroad will certainly want to buy works of art too. That is enough to make him embark. If you ask: ,,Well, to America, of course!'' You guess his thoughts: ,,I'll get through". He embarks and sells his paintings!

An exhibition in Knokke was planned. "You can ring me up" he said, waiting and adding that he did not know the number.
Neither the name of the street, and the name of the art gallery… he'll let you know later on. But his paintings are ready!

I'm beyond astonishment now. Stephaan told me in a few words, he had already more than thirty numbers of commerce registers and it was not the first time that sly people took away what he had earned with great difficulty.

Stephaan Tessely has the energy, the courage and the tenacity of a child that tries to climb the slippery side of a slide; it glides down, climbs up again; each time it glides it does not give up climbing higher.

To live the life of an artist, one is supposed to be capable of such confidence and faith, of such courage and persuasion, as the glide is long and slippery, and numerous are those who only came down.

Tessely does not want to glide down. Like all artists, he feels strongly tied to life, to love and their undeterminable interaction.

These are the polar energetic sources in his life. They should be always be at different levels, to enable the overflowing of power. Rest takes away all chances… The artist would not have to bring a message, would have no task, and the sense of his life would disappear and become absurd.

Any artist finds himself on a slippery slope, like a slanting roof. He persues the ridge. That requires such an obstinate energy, fully established in Tessely.

After leaving his studio, Tessely gets into his car and drives about in the region. The landscape enriches him, unconsciously perhaps, with superficial impressions. Canvas and colours remain in his studio, that I would call his sanctuary, if this image was not yet so old and worn out. I might also say his ‘castle’, as it is not easy to penetrate into it.

His trip through the country usually ends at a farmer’s house, or a poacher’s, or with a solitary soul, who lives somewhere in a small house. They drink together, but they talk less. They merely sit together, each one lost in his own world. Their own silent world is stretched between their head and hands. Their own silent tense world is at the same time so alike and so deeply different. Their ploughed world: to the farmer his fertile earth; to the artist: his fertile colours. Their world may be summed up in a few words…

A few words: they mean an unloading to the humble farmer, bound to his earth, grown together with it, as he lives and breathes with it, as it is his life’s aim.

A few words: they mean a loading for the artist, who want to live and to breathe in his work, who wants to be tied to all contents and grown together with all inspiration; his art, as a result of an unloading, is his life’s aim. After those short meetings, Tessely may be ripe for a large painting, where he can lay thick coats of colour, pulpy, to plough it with the palette knife.

Painting means for Tessely a valve for psychological tension. he gets rid of it on the canvas. That explains why his work is not a mere landscape: it bears a load of joy or sadness, fear or unrest.

His oblique skies, pointing at the horizon, sometimes touch us and catch our glance mysteriously.

Or we can rest at a swamp, that dark bushes and trees surround. The sky, as the swamp’s echo, makes us look and listen at once. While on one painting the sky almost bursts out of its frame, on another one the attention is captured by one point or stain.

Tessely’s landscapes are not to be found anywhere. They exist only in him. They represent nature only to a very small per cent, but they are loaded with a strong psychological power.

He observes his landscapes right through the walls of the small farmers’ houses or of his studio.

What he caught superficially, he transposes in his own key, loading it with the atmosphere of the moment when he painted the work.

From all this we easily draw the conclusion, that it would be absurd for him to take canvas and colours with him. Even a sketch cannot record how he feels something. A sketch binds one with reality and reminds one too strongly of it. A painter like Tessely must first forget what he has seen, or better, let it sink away in his own self. He cannot paint if a work did not grow and ripe in him. Only then he is able to unload it in his thick pulpy colours. I say unload on purpose, because he is not a quietly working man. Once he has started it is impossible to hold him, before he is rid of everything and the valve closes again, because the tension has disappeared. He drives through the fields again, in search of new loadings and the somethingth circle is completed.

It is easy to detect painters who use a projector. Their drawings or paintings may be nice, pleasing and they may give satisfaction, but after a while we feel something is missing. It is not always possible to say at once what is lacking. They start boring us. Those painters have been carrying the image the painted in a camera and that’s way the dimension of feeling is missing.

The eye has not that much to remember, that the help of a camera should be indispensable. It should even not percieve everything. The heart is more responsible than the eye in the art of painting. It is the real dark room to gather and to keep the images. Their projection on the canvas is so subtle, that one has to be an artist to be aware of it. The heart only conveys its message to him that learned to listen at it. It yields its secret to him, that learned to plumb its depths.

One cannot paint with a strange heart. Those opinions apply to any form of art. By means of our senses we notice things. But art can only be enjoyed inwardly.

It is quite possible that not all the works of Tessely will please everybody. This is even normal. His paintings are too tense and too little mere landscape, in order to strike at first sight. Before his work some time is required to let it penetrate. He does not help you, as he seldom speaks about his art. He is unable to do that and he need not explain, since his colours, and especially the tones, may already have told you everything.

There is no great diversity in the conception of his paintings. Still they widely differ from each other.

The variety comes from the mood in which he chose one colour or another.

Tessely does not strain after effect. He does not want to bluff, to draw some superficial attention, a propensity we find with too many contemporary artists. Doing this to make a name proves one is not a real artist, but only one in the crowd waiting for success.

Tessely throws himself into his work. Such an artist does not think of looking about him to see whether the eyes are fixed upon him, and he would not have time to do this either.

An artist makes beauty into an ideal value. It is impossible to shout this, neither in words, nor in colours, neither in sounds, nor in forms.

An artist strikes man’s heart and the totality of his human condition. Straining after effect he would only strike the eye of the ear, but man remains untouched and this is not enough for him that feels values of high quality stirring in him.

Tessely will never indulge in straining after effect.

Each of Tessely’s paintings is a compromise between sensory perception and extra-sensorial feelings. Together they build the indeterminate element in his work.

Every artist has a mysterious feeling, bears cosmic elements in his spirit, that give way to infra- and ultra- experiences. That is the reason why a work of art cannot be completely homologated by the mind alone.

In every artist light sparks from the dark cosmic chaos. If he is able to deal with it, this confers on his work a gleam of eternity.

At first meeting an artist, I soon find out whether he belongs to a group that can create what they want or a group that create what they have to.

This division reminds me of Achilles Mussche, who wrote in 1938: "We do not write what we want to, we write what we have to."

Tessely can only work when he feels forced to. Without that compulsion he does not succeed, and the work will be good for nothing. He gets the impression that he is at the end of his possibilities.

Artists of that group suffer this strongly. The joys of the better moments transport them in a euphoric mood, strong enough to fill up all pits from the periods of misfortune.

Plans made by such artists usually fall through. One day they will…, but that is all.

Tessely intended to paint a number of pastels, size: 30/40. I can make them wherever I want and they will help me for the larger works, he thought.

Moreover, those pastels are easy to put under glass, he argued, and to sell to people who cannot afford a larger painting. Those people should also get an opportunity… etc, etc. Tessely ordered thousand glasses, size 30/40. That is more profitable, he calculated, adding to this with a smile: "I do everything on a large scale!" Those thousand glasses still exist, if not all of them, a few must be broken.

Anecdotes like this put me on the track of the kind of artist I am confronted with.

Tessely is an artist who perceives the image almost unconsciously, working it out somewhere inwardly, and he starts painting only when he feels the compulsion. At work he realizes what it should become like.

He watches the growth of the work towards the unconscious image in him. He feels the landscape better according as he finishes the work.

Taken from the easel, a work of art starts a life of its own. If it has to be brought to the waiting-room for a while, that does not matter, as one day a man will come who is disposed to a kindred keynote and chooses a wall for the work.

The hand will not destroy what a human soul has created; it may only be passed inattentively for a while.

In most of his works Tessely reaches an extreme gravity, a marginal area between dream and reality, that no man’s land, where words and sounds, colours and tones have their full noble values, a realm where everything is banished that does not honour poetry.

Poetry is a limit of gravity.

Contemplating one of Tessely’s work, the whole attention is immediately claimed by the cloudy sky: it is painted in a strong, virile, earnest style, rich in contrasts.

Some of his skies recall Wagner, Parsifal: sad, depressed or victorious.

Some recall Bach: organ-music, overpowering us from thousand mouths: it is so well-balanced, so mathematically exact, so clear.

I sometimes think of Beethoven’s sixth symphony, the Pastoral Symphony, when gravity and with twinkle in the colours.

With others again I hear some of Mozart’s music, those lovely divertimentoes: playful, intimate, youthful and mature at the same time, and therefore full of melancholy.

Tessely’s paintings harmonize with poems by Guide Gezelle, Karel Van De Woestijne, Paul Van Ostaijen or any other poet: no hiatus occurs, because we penetrate into that area where the poetical values of words, sounds, colours and tones resemble each other.

Each painting hat its own rhythm, its own breath, its own life. For that reason, there is always a point where that life arises. From that point we start reading or hearing that work: it catches our attention and makes us approach. Round this point we rebuild the painting and receive it. Because enjoying a work of art is to recreate it in us. To enjoy it is to rebuild it with our own emotional materials. With Tessely that important point is usually situated in the sky.

The main accent in the rhythm of his skies is repeated in so many refrains, that we have to listen or to read over and over again. That creates in his landscapes such an enormous unity of composition. In a musical composition not a note may be left out, not a rest dropped; or else it sounds false. In a poem not a word, not a comma may be changed; or else it is spoilt. Likewise on a painting by Tessely not a fragment may be suppressed: or else we feel that something is missing, an element of that ‘Gestalt’ like the Germans call it, that essential unity, and the work loses its balance.

A good work is not composed of parts or fragments, but of integrating moments: they influence each other in such manner that they belong together in the fulliest sense of the word. This gives rise to a surplus value of the work, difficult to translate but real as long as the work remains unspoilt.

This enormous unity is strongly present in Tessely’s work. He expresses it almost scrupulously. For instance, the horizon is never a line: it is disguised. In a subtle way he obtains in that region the transition between the earth he treads on and heaven where he dreams. In that indeterminate region, like a vague hyphen, he often situates a little house, trees or a straw-pile. They give rest to the eye and to the heart.

Our heart comes closer, but it is kept at a distance, as most of Tessely’s houses are closed. These remote trees remain enigmatic and mysterious and the piles are like hedgehogs.

Tessely does not easily admit us in what is sacred to him. We have to stay at a distance. He grants his poetry to those who remain there and then approach only very cautiously.

The music of his linear rhythms and his refrains are only perceivable to those who listen quietly, modestly. Do not break silence, do not violate it by analysis and critics, or by erudition and theory. Look, feel and understand with that other intellect, which belongs to heart and mind. We thus become soundboard to that most peculiar keynote, inherent in all works by Tessely.

Like all abstract artist Tessely does not represent nature. He does not copy it, but creates each painting out of his own nature. He gives it some subjective value.

He expresses the essence of his own personality when painting the image of the so-called reality. He chooses an artistic form which is more abstractive and only to a small extent imitation of nature.

The inner world of the artist is mainly concerned. It is mixed with fears that the image of the outward world will be changed completely; that concrete constructions might cross all our horizons; that our world might lack horizons, because distances disappear.

This feeling draws Tessely closer to all abstract artists, but with him feeling predominates over intellect, gravity over severity. He is not looking for the perfect forms themselves, but for their poetical value, like nature yields them. He creates more with his soul than with his intellect. He wants to treasure up, not to blot out. He glorifies nature and expresses it in poetical forms that come close to abstraction. That poetry is the essence of his nature and he delivers a fragment of it on each painting. He is tied to the great forces that dominate nature with the admiration, the glorification, but also the fears and the suspicions of the cavemen, who in old days painted on the walls of the caves.

They too made eternal works of art loaded with mysticism, man’s double image. The soul of the world is projected in an artist’s personality: thus the world’s soul has so many valves. The artist becomes medium to the revelation of the world’s soul; he expresses it in a matter that stirs one of our senses and touches us.

The world’s soul is the point to which all artistic utterances, all real artistic forms and all –isms converge.

There is only one art, only one law, but there are as many –isms as periods, because the artist, time-bound, harmonizes his art with that time. One artist will hear more by-tones: another artist feels more nuances, but they both express that in colours or tints.

The world’s soul is light; man is the prism; the artist build the rainbow. From this it is evident, why it has always been deplorable to live as an artist among colour-blind people.

True art cannot anchor, nor stagnate: it must evolve with its time, in being the expression of it, in being its sprit and soul at the same time. Only a photograph dates, because it crystallizes for ever a part of a second. A photograph fixes world’s history. A work of art uncovers the world’s soul: hence it is mysticism and hallucination, abstraction and reality at the same time.

It does not matter whether the creative impulse springs from macro- or from microcosm. Art is the resultant of all forces in time.

Mere abstract art is as aberrant as mere realism. Together they build the poles between which the artist breaks his way.

Tessely’s art is neither mere abstraction, nor mere realism: it oscillates between those poles.

Elements from nature are clearly distinct in his work. It builds the ‘Gestalt’, a kind of spiritual unity, of integrating abstract moments.

A wide evolution remains possible for an artist who does not cling to one pole only. He should not allow to be set down on the roadside like a landmark, with some label or other, in memory of the somethingth artistic expression, exposed to time’s erosion.

Never before that much was written or explained about human values, but never before their devaluation was more terrible.

Nevertheless mankind produced already innumerable artist, who created fine values, that build an immeasurable, inestimable, infinitely varied heritage, with which to decorate eternity.

Art lives in continuous relation with mankind, finding in it an eger soundboard, or creating conflict-situations.

Indifference only is destructive and mortifying: it looses what was created and dooms all artistic values to oblivion.

A Herculean task still awaits the artist. Mankind’s stables are terribly dirty. Grim energy is needed to put one’s shoulder to the wheel and grasp the task of bringing man back on the way of the surplus values. Mankind got lost in a world of problems without issue… unless Beauty remains the only open gate…

With so many other palettes we nail Tessely’s at that Gate of Beauty.

In each of us some fear is slumbering, that the tremendous evolution we are living might be impossible to stop: the load of inertia is too terrible. We fear that we prepare our perdition with develish zeal and approach it with staggering rapidity.

Such unrest, tension, oppression is felt in the works of many contemporary artists. They fear our time’s fate, weighing on human spirit, oppressing, sad. They work off their disintegrated feelings by a return to the primitive man: he supports them, because he at least lived without asking for reasons. He was completely dependant on nature in great fear but also in deep admiration and awe of it.

This kind of mysticism is what we feel in many works of art, sometimes unconsciously, a kind of reticence, of mysteriousness, clearly demonstrable in Tessely’s art. Not to demonstrate in the sense of showing with one’s hand, but with that primitive feeling always present in us when confronted with nature. We know that fear, when we feel lost near a huge forest. That strange restlessness overpowers us along a quiet corn-field, bathing in the sun. At such moments we do not think, we do not feel. We just exist. That strange feeling sometimes takes hold of us before one of Tessely’s larger paintings: it is like sinking away in time very deeply, a moment of more existence, more intensive, just in colours. For a while we have been very close to the origins, when all colours where still the ‘son’.

Contemporary art hides itself in a shell and becomes a reaction against the outward world.

This psychological attitude is easy to notice in Tessely’s work. He manifests a typical reticence full of mystery. But his art expresses no flight. He does not withdraw from the world. He is steeled against it. He flies the world’s squabbles and paints nature, inaccessible for him who is not guided. Marshes and woods bar the way. It is his secret way, where he retires from the world. With a taciturn farmer, in a closed, little house, one is in fact close to the cave with its small entrance. One does not find it easily. One is wellcome only when one already knows the entrance, because one belongs to the house.

Those are not people to bring a message to and Tessely does not want that, on purpose.

He does not live from or for theories. He just paints what he feels and has to be delivered from. That is why I suppose he will never make abstraction that loses all contact with reality. Maybe he will go further still than he does now. It is already to be felt intuitively. But he will always stay far from the limit where abstraction becomes its own purpose. He loves his colours, tones, forms and materials too deeply, to paint a work that could be suspended upright-down.

I do not pretend that we could as well suspend a Mondriaan, a Kandinsky, a Vasarely, with us a Jan Burssens and many other, upright-down. They conceive an upper- and underside, but with them a mistake or misinterpretation is not always excluded.

Putting some of Tessely’s works on their left side or on their right side, you will get a marvellous abstract painting. But do not incline your head a little, or the ‘Gestalt’, the natural unity, reappears and you’ll have to turn it in the right direction again.

Tessely does not part from a theory and will not be inclined to work in parallel with a theory, neither according to it, nor in reaction against it.

It is even impossible to have conversations of that kind with him: they simply do not interest him.

He will answer that he paints, now in one way, later on perhaps in another way… that is the only information to get from him when you try to find a starting point for such a conversation. All dialogues about theories are excluded with him.

That grants him a special place in the artistic world to-day, where numerous are those who part from theories. How often is not the paraphrase of a work better and deeper than the work itself!

Theories bind the artist to his time on an intellectual level. This is nothing for Stephaan Tessely!

Tessely is linked up with his time, like the heart with the body. He endures the blows of that time like any sensitive man and trembles with its characteristic outbreaks. He does not live outside of it, but he does not participate in it. Hence he is not linked up with its features and he is able to withdraw in his studio and to open or to make transparent the walls that enclose him only for the images that stir or touch him, delight or transport him.

Painting for Tessely means retiring into himself.

In his own heart there are no prescriptions, no characteristics, no theories. There are only the colours and he knows how to use them in a very delicate way. I should say he weighs his colours and prefers speaking in some tones only.

His palette is not too large, but he scrubs it regularly, to work in a quite different colour, to express another atmosphere.

What binds him is the canvas and its measurement. He loses not a square inch. If not the whole work is expressive, it will be wrong. He has this characteristic in common with the architect. The complete surface is to be used: no vague spots, no insignificant openings. Even the indefinite, the blurred region, the vaporous horizon should not strike in the painting, or it will seam week.

On Tessely’s work the eye is never attracted by the vague horizon, because the eye accepts it. The distances are uncertain, like the problematic future, that remains indeterminate. They eye accepts, because every thoughtful being will accept the same on looking further into time and space.

What is clearly designed to-day, yesterday it was still very vague. That is, just to use Prof. Colle’s terminology, one of the ‘éternals’ slumbering in all of us. Tessely is linked up with his time in living its tragedies and its nervosity. He knows his fate time-bound, but he does not accept any theory advanced in this time.

Sometimes he paints in a joyful mood, sometimes sad, or he may choose warm colours. Many works have brown-red-yellow as main tone, but he often surprises us with blue-white and black. So we feel how he is time-bound and does not pass by the world actuality with indifference.

He transposes his feelings about actuality by choosing a certain colour as main tone for his work.

All art is, whether it wants it or not, time-bound first of all, because the artist is a sensitive man who undergoes his time.

A work of art does not only open a wall of the present, it also makes transparent a small fragment of the past. Therefore it has such a great significance for human life in general and for man in particular.

Every artist is gifted with a dimension that he has to express under inner compulsion; every dignified man is gifted with an inner compulsion to sound the depth of that dimension.

Art is a magic space where every man has an appointment out of time and beyond all time. There we forget our fears, where we find back what was lost and do not feel the pressure of having to get on, forward and forward, always in that one direction, straight to the end.

We might well break a lance for the artist nowadays, who represents man as a being that is pulled asunder. Man is destroyed and lives riven by huge forces that drag an enormous catastrophe, annihilating what he built.

 

We need artists who tear the garment to pieces, that now covers our explosive society. We certainly are in urgent need of them, but he who does not participate also lives in his time and feels our fears for the destructive forces accumulating everywhere in this world.

Tessely is also a modern artist, even if he cannot find a basis for new beauty in bursting colours. The masses do not interest him. As an artist he remains an individual, looking for those other individuals who live and a small house and seldom leave the roof over their head.

Consciously or unconsciously, we all feel that something menaces. Our time needs artist to express the threat, to indicate the crack in the crust, to draw the attention on the misleading race-problems and so-called cultural revolutions.

But our time also needs artist who turn away from these passions and offer us rest in their work.

They both complete each other and we need them both strongly, as man gets used too quickly to a cruel world and does not sufficiently enjoy beauty and splendour.

He drinks his whisky and eats hearty toasts, looking at television images of emaciated people; he sits and eats his picnic along the road, where the cars rush one after another. India, Africa, South-America are far away, but the tranquillity of wood behind him does not charm him any more.

We need as many different artists as there are colours and tones between infra-red and ultra-violet. For in nature only the rainbow is still noticed by most of us and holds the attention for a moment.

Like a colour, every artist finds himself alone, and yet linked up with all colours. For alone they mean little, together they build light. That is their only possible bond. They should not become the slave of a society that they have to glorify blindfold. They should be allowed to choose themselves their place in the rainbow.

They have the right to mutilate man, or better to represent mutilated man, the world seething like a volcano; the right to throw the most violent colours on the canvas and to hurt us to draw our attention.

It is true, the world is full of barricades, built by man everywhere. It is only too true.

But let us remain grateful to artists, who divert our attention, by means of a fervent work, from man who ought to be over all animals.

Some of Tessely’s paintings radiate a hearty, poetical tranquillity. The chosen colours and tones play a part in it. We might even over-estimate that part, because warm colours are most readily and willingly passing as a reason for a hearty, poetical tranquillity.

This would be a simplistic and false explanation of Tessely’s art. The true reason is to be found much deeper: it lies in the conception of his paintings. In these quiet paintings Tessely expresses his close unity with the landscape. Since he was a child he has learned to live with strong love for this landscape. Man only deceived him, the landscape not yet. He who accepts it like it is participates in the sublime rest that it radiates.

We like to fuse with that rest. Our anticipating imagination for psychological conditions finds a counterpart in such works. They go together like friends’ hands shaking: they are essentially different, but become one at that moment.

In that hand-grasp, the physical as well as the psychological one, our confidence is enclosed. We receive rest as a guest. Sweet poetry flowers in us. We are enriched with much happiness, springing from the double relation: that from Tessely to the landscape and the one from the landscape to our psyche.

On the other hand, Tessely’s colours also often give concrete expression to the reality of a world, full of fears and torments, tensions and anxieties. He chooses sober colours, deep tones, sets them little transparent, but thick and powerful.

Sometimes, in the middle of the work, he stretches out a clear spot, like a shriek. This is more the echo of world-actuality, than an attempt to accuse it. It is often a lament, now and then a sigh. We should not try to interpret that shriek, looking for motives or imposing a meaning on it, as we might betray the work as a whole.

It is a shriek that rises from his psyche, his subconscience: it sums up all the motives that determine the attitude that he assumes towards the world, but without choosing it.

Tessely does not condemn, nor does he accept. He notices that we live among motives that justify his shriek. An explosion would not give him a greater shock than a concrete road across a beautiful corner of nature. Would not both account for that shriek, indeed?

Tessely is a poet and a thinker, soft and passionate, silent and ranting at the same time. He is easy to lead, but not to lock. He is not indifferent towards the world, but he will not get disturbed by an idea, or want to realize it practically.

He possesses the outward world and bears it along with him. He expresses it in a stream of exclamation-marks, usually shouted from the lift side of the horizon and higher up to the right, in thick colours and rich contrasts, strong and violent. Something in his skies bites. With a stroke of the palette-knife he stabilises the doubts, the incertitudes, the instabilities and adventures of the outward world.

Maybe the shriek is coming from behind the horizon and does the painter only put his exclamation-marks to stress that very human shriek, as the explosion is always menacing or took place already.

We are not looking for an explanation of Tessely’s technique in setting that white blot like a shriek. We shall not even try to find or to force an elucidation. When we like a work of art, we are subject to emotions. We have just tried to describe it and to make a print of our own emotion on watching Tessely’s paintings.

He is undoubtedly a painter of our time. We should approach him to feel his contents, to be touched by them. They cannot easily be translated.

Tessely is not a superficial observer. There is a touch about him of the child that notices everything, mainly details, and of the poet, who lets operate things on him and expresses them, fading one detail, intensifying others. Moreover he is a painter who lets us experience everything we must have seen in childhood, by means of a few strokes, accentuated by colours.

Tessely has been travelling about in Germany, France, Canada and the United States and he has seen a treasure of landscapes that differ widely. But nothing of this is to be found in his work. He paints the landscape of his youth, like he experienced and assimilated it. Perhaps the foreign landscapes, their beauty and richess, will be expressed later on, when they have sunk into his mind and taken effect. His twenties will be added to his youth, unconsciously added to the years of which we think with melancholy. Fortunately that period gets longer as we grow older.

For an artist the period of youth is tremendously important, because so many images drop asleep, whose essence he will be able later on to convert into values, distilling pure emotion from them.

We feel the landscape of his youth on each painting, we share the emotion, the values enrich us.

On some paintings light is jubilant in warm tones, on others we feel violent exclamations, seldom dissonances. He accepts the riches of the fairy-tale of his youth, together with the real poverty he knew later on. Now and then that undertone bursts out in his work, in memory of less good years in his life. We look in vain for wit in his work. Maybe that too will be achieved one day, when the heavy burden has fallen from his heart.

Tessely does not paint in two dimensions like many contemporaries. His powerful technique and refined mastering of the colours grant his paintings much depth, in the space as well as in the spirit of the landscapes.

He paints in one main colour, but playing with the tones he creates the vaporous distances of a Flemish landscape without motorways, bungalows, where no towns break the horizon.

He often paints the horizon low: this makes the sky overpowering and the earth mysterious. But he also loves the fertile earth, full of diversity and surprise. The small plots of earth, cultivated between the suburbs by the small farmers, enchant him. It is agreeable to work there now, because their value rose sharply. ‘I’m working here on a million", a farmer of the region told me. "And formerly this earth was worth nothing".

Tessely glorifies that earth. The sky over it is powerful, like in the fairy-tales of our youth, full of cloudy animals.

His paintings may give a shock, but they will never offend, as he is not brutish. He has known poverty and now he precipitates that period in paintings of value. That time is compensated by the transposition in valuable paintings of what he then experienced. One must have known poverty to master that magic art obstinately. Involuntarily I must think of Charlie Chaplin, who also understood how to translate the commonplace reality into humour. By this magic Tessely’s vision on nature gets more authenticity marvellously charges with tension.

Painting he wrenched himself free from that period of youth. The strong impressions have become memories now and they are the source of inspiration, that never dries for a real artist, who knows to appreciate its waters.

Youth is fundamental for life, that will continue in function of it. Growing older, we believe that we understand it better and better, and we will not admit, that our image of it is mostly a ‘fairy-tale’. when we were young the snow was two-three feet high and all our holidays were sunny.

The chestnuts that we knocked out of the trees were much better: the strawberries were larger and deeper red: the bread tasted better and the slices were thicker and even more delicious. The artist should always keep that youth’s source flowing. He should not deny it, but keep it in mind as a deep truth.

Youth is inexhaustible, because it grows in breadth and depth, as we grow older. It is like a dark cellar full of diamonds: we have just got to go and fetch them one by one and to give them a rub with the sleeve of our riper years’ coat and we shall grant them more glitter, more sparkle, more splendour.

That reminds me of the film on Rembrandt’s life, with Edward Balser. The old artist goes and seeds back one of his own works, he has even got to pay for it: one of his last coins to see his own painting! Then he gives that significant rub of his sleeve over the canvas, thickly covered with dust. The colours are still there, they still shine. The old man now stumbles towards his death. He has just found back his whole youth in the colours under the dust. Once more he looks back: very old, but so blissful, because he is allowed to conclude that he has not lived for nothing: "Ich habe nicht umsonst gelebt".

That is the most beautiful royalty that time ever can offer to an artist.

This touching scene from Rembrandt’s life – whether authentic or romanticized does not matter – throws a striking light upon the eternal truth of the lifelong, indissoluble connection of an artist with his art, like by an invisible navel-string.

The artist plunges his soul into his creation and at the same time he lets the creation penetrate him, grow and expand in him, till he is one with it.

I once saw an artist in despair, almost in tears, because in a collective exhibition his very bad painting of horses was suspended among old furniture. So it would not be too conspicuous.

This anecdote of a weak painter illustrates, I believe, best of all that interaction between the artist and his creation. In this interaction lies a kind of magic, something almost beyond words.

The artist has to be one with his creation and also one with its object. He is a medium for both. The relation between the artist and the object determines the ‘Gestalt’ of the creation.

Tessely is sensitive for nature in a very peculiar way. This is the motive for his feeling, his living and perceiving many little corners in the landscape of the Lys, as something more than mere image. He who wants to compare Tessely’s landscapes to bare nature will feel disappointed. They do not want to be reality face to face with the existing reality.

Tessely is not a copyist of nature’s beauty. He remains out of the real atmosphere, which he believes full of false resonances and confusing sounds. His universe is not that of Brown, Jones and Robinson, scientifically based and historically developed reality. Painting he keeps out of the circle that we try to draw about him. He is further away from the horizon than we do. His universe is wider. He chooses and draws his horizon himself. He lives in his own world and determines its dimensions.

In creative periods Tessely becomes another human being. He chooses colours, mixes them and sets them on the canvas. Some tubes of colours and a work of art is born: that is quite extraordinary! Seeing, admiring that work of art will create a certain mood in us: that is to be called magic!

The painter’s joy at the creation sparkles from the physical to the psychological pole: he takes in that load while he is working and he delivers himself of it through his work of art.

When that sparkling joy, that tension, were lacking, there is no resultant of all these forces and we find ourselves before a painting that radiates no artistic beauty.

Tessely does not set colours here and there carelessly, to make money out of it. Each painting is part of his joy that he spreads out on the canvas, transposing it into colours, now glad, then sad. He who loves that work is also an artist, but he may lack the skill to materialize the same joy, to express it in lasting materials, that radiate that joy for sensitive spectators.

Painting is choosing the place of the colours in such manner that the sensitive spectator will receive that joy from the artist. The work of art becomes medium between the artist and society. The artist becomes the link between a society that likes him, and magic forces living in society since the moment, when man admired his hands and took conscience of what he is able to realize with them.

Tessely bears many magic forces in him. We hope that he may penetrate deeper and deeper into the magic cave and send us his messages in rich colours.

He happens to live in Deurle, in St.-Martens-Latem, in St.-Denis-West. Let him live wherever he wants: he will remain a link in the glorius ‘School of Latem’. and that school has still many white walls.

AFTERWORD

By Paul Piron

 

Above monograph was written and published in 1970.

Thirty years later the work of Tessely is more intense, more mature, the prophecies fulfilled, the successes grown, the growth and depth more intense.

The impressive list of exhibitions – both in musea and in private collections which show his work –

proves this.

The river Lys and the country life were never lost as a great source of inspiration to Tessely. They live on in his memories, more powerful and intense.

A scenery which will always be, immortalized in paint by Tessely’s special way to abstract – visual dream sceneries – expressively built.

The memories and the nostalgia are so deeply rooted in Tessely that the power and the dream become greater and greater whether he puts them on canvas in his studio in Flanders, the USA, Switzerland or Israel.

Now with the ageing of the years Tessely also makes vigorous Nudes and Clowns.

Clowns, torn inside by heartfelt grief.

The mask, the camouflage and the smile of the Noble, the Serious, the Optimist, the Merry, the Funny.

Other themes are the Israeli works like: the Folklore, the Joy, the Thought, the Story, the Agony, the Penance, The Sabat, The Shoah.

The Shoah partly realistic partly abstract, great and imposing museum works which only Tessely can make. But also impressive, with formats of up to 3 by 5 meters.

Originating from compassion with the Jewish people, the stories and memories of his family.

The works of Tessely are still a medley from past and present, nostalgia and grief from the old Flemish Country, the landscape of the Lys, - the dream sceneries – the country life – but with the ageing of the years also the joy, the quiet moments of modern life.

He still makes what his heart tells him to at that moment and he visualizes this at his own distinct way and technique, more mature, more intensely coloured, more exuberant and often more abstract.

One can see and say "This is a Tessely". With which he has put his mark on the chronicle of modern art and specially on Flemish Art – The School of Latem.

Joyful are his latest works of dancers, the orchestra halls, auditors enjoying the music. As if he wants to say that with the ageing of the years – there is a difference between grief and real grief, joy and real joy, life and real life.

Does he want to say: there is two kinds of sorrow and two kinds of joy?

As written:

When someone is very concerned about his misfortune and crawls into a corner and doubts help, this is gloomy misfortune of which one says (1): The Sjechina does not live at the house of melancholy.

The other is the honest grief of a human being who knows what is wrong and what has happened to him.

This also applies to joy.

Someone who lacks real contents and because of his vain little fun does not see it and does not complete it, that someone is a fool.

But someone of true joy is someone whose "house" is burned and feels the want deep in his soul, but has started to built a new "house" and is joyful in his heart about every stone which is laid.

Is that not the surprise Tessely holds, that after every work and every period his heart is joyful and his new works are even more intense and more joyful ~ does he just happen to visualize his stages of life?

Tessely himself on the subject, still averse from theories and in his own short style:

I am 66 now (born 1933). I paint day and night. Work becomes easier and with the passing of time I am more inspired and indeed I feel more joy.

Isn’t that what it is all about?