'Pianohondje'
Works on paper 2016 and ongoing
pictures by Koen Cant
Since 2016, Jan D’Hooghe has been working on Pianohondje: an expanding series of paintings on paper that, although once conceived as a cycle of one hundred works, has now surpassed two hundred — and continues to evolve.
The modest support, a sheet of Hahnemühle or Canson oil paper measuring 50x65 cm, becomes time and again a stage on which painting may ask its most fundamental questions.This series is not a narrative in images, but an ongoing exercise. Each work is a painterly proposition that begins from a single idea: a hue, a brushstroke, a shape, a reflection of light, or a texture. In their simplicity, they are not sketches but fully realized movements of thought in paint, through which D’Hooghe explores what it means to paint — and why.
The almost monastic atmosphere of the studio is essential. The morning light falling through the window, the rhythm of repetition, the scent of oil paint and turpentine mingling in the air — here the work emerges, in the slowness of the moment. There is no haste. There is only ritual — the preparation of the paint, the mixing of color, the slight hesitation before the first gesture. Some days, nothing seems to succeed; on others, the image flows almost effortlessly from the hand. But always there is that quiet surrender to the process — a form of presence that does not command, but listens.
The series originated at the Academy of Waasmunster, under the guidance of Johan Verschaeve and Jean-Marie Bytebier. There, a collaboration began with De Sperwer, an organization working with adults with disabilities. From those encounters arose a different view on making and meaning, on play and seriousness. Human closeness, the unexpected, the dissonant — all of it seeps gently into the work, without ever becoming explicit.
The title Pianohondje came to the artist in a dream. Two words that together evoke something that resists being pinned down. For D’Hooghe, it symbolizes an inner state: a space between the playful and the still, the sensuous and the meditative. Between alpha and zen. The images arrive like breathing, like an echo, like a memory of something you can almost touch, but never fully grasp.The Pianohondje series is like a diary without dates, an inner landscape that unfolds anew each time. The paintings invite the viewer to slow down, to look with attention, to share a quiet kind of concentration. Within that lies only the now — as theme, and as witness.Dr. Ernst Stiel
September 2025
