The work of Yves Beaumont (°Ostend, 1970) is characterized not only by the constancy of its imagery, of the creative thought behind it, but also by his belief that he is a painter who can and may speak his own language. Though he gets his inspiration from a single source – the landscape – he has a gift for transforming this traditional subject into a contemporary meditation on painting and its means. In his own words, he looks for the 'visual translation of the landscape element’. Everything to do with this concept serves as a means and an impetus to, and a cause for, expressive enthusiasm, as a challenge to trace everything back to one ultimate point, to a line, to a surface division between light and dark, a graphic network of cracks in the ice, branches throwing a shadow against a bright background, shattering the serenity of a scenic rhythm, a vegetative element’s twist, reflections and the emotionally charged yet composed feel of a repetitive memory of trees in dense forests and woodland areas. His painting is at once sober and ecstatic. He finds himself fascinated and inspired not just by the Dutch and Flemish landscape painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the English masters Turner and Constable, but also by Spilliaert and Mondrian. We should also name Theodore Rousseau and Camille Corot. Even the work of Claude Monet can be said to be in line with Beaumont’s views on landscape, in the sense that reality and pictoriality merge with each other enthusiastically, that the thought transcends that which is portrayed and slowly seizes the viewer as it has the author, the creator, the visionary. The monumentality of some of his artistic approaches, views and interpretations reveals the intensity of the emotion, the need to repeat, the fear to say goodbye, the knowledge that the subject has freed itself from its contours. Yves Beaumont starts from an observed or experienced reality, from a fact that immediately acquires a purely artistic style an undefined

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