The Hidden History - Tom Poelmans

 

Whenever Tom Poelmans starts to paint, he is flooded with a rather innocent and spontaneous thought that he can freely paint whatever he wants, through his floating brushstrokes on the canvas. Each of his creation inevitably faces that illusion of free  will that he himself claims. The final painting is undoubtedly the result of this struggle. It is a journey into the author's mind, based on infinite possibilities, a process that begins with a drawing and then ends with a decidedly unpredictable pictorial image. His work shows an exceptional and intricate heterogeneity, with a dreamlike vocation  rich in symbols, allegories and metaphors, characterized both by precise compositions  and by confident and material brushstrokes, covering every inch of the surfaces he  uses. Poelmans becomes an omniscient narrator, metaphorically impersonating a sort  of fusion between the famous works of Calvino "The Cloven Viscount", "The baron in  the Trees" and "The Nonexistent Knight”, grappling with imaginative and empathic  images of timeless stories: and this is how "The Hidden History" was born.

 

To  paraphrase Italo Calvino, Poelmans “climbs the trees of the home garden and promise never to come down again in his entire life”: it is the metaphor of a personal and  coherent path of research, to gradually find his own dimension, determined by taste  for irony. The creative structure is now totally abandoned to the fairy tale, the  memories appear as an opportunity to learn about world and the narration proceeds  according to two levels of reading: the first one, of immediate fruition, and the second  one, rich in allegories and symbolism, in which there are numerous points of  reflection that oscillate between reality and illusion, ideology and ethics, and so on.