Selection by Bart De Baere

My heart makes me spontaneously choose one of the very early female bathers, in a narrow vertical format, because some time long ago they touched me. They were at the back, in the dark part of that large rectangular space. Philippe therefore did not pay any particular attention to them, he was setting out to develop his oeuvre. I was fascinated by the fact that those works, which could perhaps still be called art school works, already possessed an individual character, both in the manner of painting and in their intense ambition.

Making a choice here should perhaps not be objectifying, as in most of what I do. Therefore two borders, at the front and at the back. A spontaneous, subjective choice may well be an homage to an oeuvre that contains so much.

The second choice is the white piece that I have seen somewhere during our last meeting while he was still alive. Still-painted, painted away, an attempt at allaying, but whitish in the skin only, like snow that has lost its freshness and has become mixed with earth and movement.