Geometry and harmony

Jef Verheyen continuously dialogues with art history. With his diptychs, triptychs and folding screens he links in with a long tradition. Multiple crafts – such as textile design, painting and art furniture – were already being brought together in the folding screens of ancient China. In his five-panel screen, Verheyen explores the boundaries between art and architecture, painting and sculpture, function and decoration. In the last series of paintings of his career, Verheyen works with basic geometric shapes and perspective lines. He studies and explores mathematical proportions and Greek philosophy as a basis for harmony. He paints, for example, the square shape of the megaron, an ancient Greek architectural term. Between 1980 and 1984 he paints trompe l’oeil spaces, in which diamond-shaped mirrors float in infinity.