BAROC PAINTINGS

Baroc is the signature of Bart Ocket, an established Belgian painter from the art city of Bruges. Born in 1959, he lives and works in Bruges, the city where he went to school, the city that moves him, inspires him and ‘obliges’ him to paint.

Bart has been drawing and painting since childhood and is a pure autodidact who received no academic training. From watercolour and gouache, he evolved to acrylic and oil paints in which he found the opportunities and freedom to refine his figurative painting style.

In his contemporary works with a focus on the female form, he is guided by images of people, faces, poses that appeal to him and make him think. Each painting starts from one or more photographs, which he sometimes takes himself or where he is guided by pictures from the media, the press, etc...With his figurative renderings, Bart does not aim to portray or represent anything specific. Rather, he uses the woman's face or pose to convey a universal idea or emotion. Above all, he seeks Beauty, as a stimulation to our senses.

Besides creating contemporary paintings, Bart is also passionate about creating artworks in a classical realist style that draw on historical themes, based on the masterpieces of the Baroque, Romantic and Realist movements from the 16th to 19th centuries. In doing so, he is deeply inspired by the Baroque painters including Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi, Guido Reni, Nicolas Régnier, Johannes Vermeer, the French realist painters of the late 19th century (Courbet, Bougereau, Jacques-Louis David, ...), the pre-Raphaelites and other masters of Romanticism.

With these classical paintings, he tries to restore the value of Beauty that is destroyed by much contemporary art. After all, it was the pursuit of beauty that enabled mankind to create great masterpieces over the centuries. Beauty is inseparable from our ‘being’ and we inevitably strive for it.

In doing so, he mainly paints bodies that in their nakedness and beauty seek sexuality, but are also subjugated or overwhelmed by all the feelings, from ecstasy to pain and suffering that accompany it. His art contains a broad spectrum of references and echoes to the glorious past of European Baroque painting and classical realism of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. He thus blends several centuries of painting into exuberant beauty, following the rules of Baroque aesthetics.