Rinus Van de Velde explores circular narratives in virtual, actual and parallel universes by encompassing paintings, installations, sculptures and videos. He builds a unique artistic universe in each work based on primary historical sources such as photographs taken or collected by himself, images clipped from the media, and documentation of historical figures.

The main keyword to build his practice is the circular narratives in virtual, actual and parallel universe. Van de Velde, who starts from the assumption that the gap between reality and fiction is not too far, and shares loose boundaries, explores the various possibilities brought by the flexibility of the boundaries. The fictional story, a mixture of real events and imagination collected by the arts, crosses between the realm of fiction and non-fiction, becoming the basis of his unique storytelling. In particular, the work in which a character with a similar appearance to the artist attracts the concepts of doppelgänger and parallel universe to his artistic practice and finds the expandability of paintings.

Van de Velde’s work features a structure of a combination of upper images and lower texts that seems to borrow classical media layouts such as newspaper. By borrowing this traditional layout, he encourages audience to reconsider reality of the situations which the artist describes in his paintings and to continuously infer an allegory between the image and the text. The sentence from Van de Velde operates as a monologue adding a calm, contemplative mood in the image. In recent works, most of the sentences, written in the first person perspective combined with images, give an illusion that seems to be the autobiographical narrative of the artist.

Through the continuous exploration of materials, the artist has recently presented color drawing using colored pencils and oil pastels. Rather than describing details, the mystery with a dreamy atmosphere is added with an abstract expressions by the characteristic of oil pastel.

Rinus Van de Velde lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. He received his master degrees at Sint Lucas Antwerpen in 2006 and at HISK (Hoger Instituut Voor Schone Kunsten - Vlaanderen) in 2010. He has held solo exhibitions at numerous prestigious museums such BOZAR (2022) in Brussels, Kunstmuseum Luzern (2021) in Luzern, Frac des Pays de la Loire (2021) in Nantes, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Malaga (2020). His works are in the collections including S.M.A.K., Belfius Art Collection, Royal museum of Fine Arts in Belgium, Kunstmuseum Den Haag Den Haag and Museum Voorlinden in Netherlands and CAC Málaga in Spain.