Jean-Claude Dresse

Artist Jean-Claude Dresse

Charleroi, 8 September 1946

He studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi where he mainly worked with Marcel Gibon. In 1985, he held his first personal exhibition in Brussels. Since then, he has regularly been exhibiting in Belgium, in France and in the Netherlands. In 1990, he made, for the Belgian State, a 90 m2 monumental fresco in the entrance hall of the new administrative area of the city of Charleroi.  Jean-Claude Dresse is one of the few artists who, relying on the great examples of the past, was able to revisit and recalibrate them according to his personal vision. He creates this way an emotion that brings back to the obscure sources of our affectivity which he enriches thanks to the contribution of a carefully designed production and of secret colours and harmonies in order to make us enjoy some kind of mystery. Served by the powers of his experience and of an exceptional technique, he manages to adorn convention with all the attractions of imagination and reaches an unusual symbolism of a very particular seduction. It's not by chance that Jean-Claude Dresse's paintings have the combined charms of a disrupted realism and of a poetical escape, they are moreover admirably served by a “capacity of making” which impresses, all the more so that he is never overburdened with this “know-how” of which the hyperrealists are nostalgic. His work is a “global harmony” which he formulates with his own means: the poetical or symbolical meaning of the painting holds the artist as much as its own plastic splendor. For him, image and color have to be brought to a certain degree of “necessary richness”.