MARC KENNES

Classical music and visual art: it is a remarkable relationship. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) developed a theory about how he came up with abstraction and involved many art disciplines such as theatre and music. Surprisingly, the German topical painter Neo Rauch often listens to Claude Debussy while painting. Marc Kennes is in good company... In a recent series Marc Kennes investigates the relationship between painting and the music of the Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975). On a recent visit to his atelier in Borgerhout, the artist painted to the sounds of the Russian master's Fifth Symphony, which has many references to the difficult time and place where it was composed: alienation, repression and insurrection. Some passages were in a truly diabolic form. The choice for Shostakovich does not surprise me. Intense music and intense painting incorporate conflicting emotions. There are also formalistic parallelisms. Marc Kennes builds up his paintings by applying layer..