Jan De Vliegher’s paintings are reminiscent of an Impressionism that uses the object as an alibi for the eruption of highly expressive light studies on the canvas. De Vliegher paints ‘familiar objects’: glass, porcelain plates, marble busts, interior fragments, facades, and so on. But he deconstructs traditional pictorial illusionism which leads to an increasingly higher level of abstraction.

As a painter he seems infatuated with his subjects, which he manages to ‘capture’ in a highly sensual and evocative way. There’s something Baroque about his work, which could also be considered as memories of a romantic world view, in which subjective perceptions are raised to a universal level. His work is hardly a case of ‘superficial’ decorative painting, nor does it aspire to be profound or visionary. The relationship with a ‘real’ reality is maintained, but he chooses to add elements to it or omit them