The first time I saw the works of Patrick Gerola, a new sense of pleasure came over me. Essentially, his works made me feel something I had never felt before.

To put it simply, the primary cause of this sensation was the vividness and intensity of the colours. His sense of colour is mysterious because even though the colours are so intense, his moist and sleek colours are extremely relaxing and seemingly com- forting my eyes.

Second was the aesthetic beauty within his brush strokes. In some, but not all of his works, I can see the lively lines created by his arms that move and jump around lightly at times, while at other times they seem to be heavy. Looking at these lines makes me feel good for no logical reason whatsoever.

The third cause behind this sense of pleasure was the mysterious world hidden in the canvases. I want to take a closer look at these three elements that intrigued me, but before I start, we need to briefly cover the life and career of this artist.Patrick Gerola was born in Brussels, Belgium. He came to Japan in 1983 at the age of 24, and since then he has lived and worked as an artist in Japan.

It should be noted that his wife strongly supports the success of the artist, a vocalist whom he met and married shortly after he came to Japan. Although he is called a painter, in addition to painting he is also actively involved in other artistic pursuits, including the creation of sculptures, graphical works, decorative works, and installations. He always seizes the opportunities that come his way. However, when forced to choose, he would still call himself a painter. Japan is his base of activities, but as he has gradually started to exhibit his works outside Japan, more people have begun to shown an interest in his individualistic sensitivity.

As stated in his biography, his mother was a painter and his brother was also aspiring to become a painter. However, his beautiful mother passed away when he was a child. His brother has been living in Italy for a long time and building up his career as a painter. He was brought up in an environment that naturally led him to have an affinity for the arts.

He studied at the Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, and beginning in 1981, he did stage artwork for two years. I imagine that his work with a choreographer who was the artistic director at the dance school run by Maurice Bejart, which is well known in Japan, also turned out to be extremely beneficial and valuable for him in pursuing a career as a painter later in life.It seems to have helped him unconsciously developed his sense of colour, space, movement, and structure, while at the same time making him more aware of stage effects.

All his works, both three-dimensional and two-dimensional pieces, are al- ways created based on a three-dimensional inspiration. I feel that he always keeps a third-person perspective in the bottom of his mind. He’s constantly contemplating how to put his works together, the space in which they exist, and that third-person perspective. He does not compromise in this artistic exploration. There is no doubt that his involvement in stage art work caused him to appreciate the importance of staging in his artworks, and it is something that he has been putting it into practice throughout his career.

Going back to the first of the three characteristic I mentioned in the opening, I learned that the secret be- hind his vivid colours is that he makes his own paints. He mixes resin into pigments, an invention of his that seems to be based on the fresco painting technique. These paints produce a graceful impression and lustre in paintings when they are applied on the canvas. They somehow remind me of the colours seen in Italian de- signs. It has also something to do with the control of illumination intensity during painting.For example, not only is he unsatisfied with the intensity of colours created in flat brightness such as broad daylight, but also he is in fact sceptical about it. Instead, he prefers subdued forms of light so that he can notice the effect that emerges in three dimensions.

Creating works in this kind of environment enables him to create colours with a distinct freshness that rules the canvas. I describe this phenomenon as magical colours reflected in the “light called darkness.”As for the aesthetic beauty of his strokes, I suppose it’s probably a reflection of the sensation he received from the physical dynamism he saw during his work with modern dance, which I mentioned earlier. In modern dance, the free and aesthetic physical movements in a three dimensional space are expressed rhythmically within two dimensions that remain intact. The choreographic strokes combined with the vivid and bright colours transform the canvas into a live stage.

As for his mysterious world, the third characteristic, I am sure that anyone who gazes at one of his paintings long enough can experience this world. In the beginning, what we see is indeed a flat and graphical work. However, in a little while, we begin to feel our eyes and minds being lured into the world beyond the canvas. You find yourself drawn to the other side of a landscape you have never seen, despite the fact that this landscape is something surreal: a face of the hill covered by a carpet of vibrant flowers in contrast to the utterly plain sky painted in solid colours, or a realistic landscape that can be seen behind the plain trees that look as if they were pasted there.

To me these bold, direct, and simple expressions are extremely individualistic. At the same time, the mysterious aura radiating from the canvas is somehow similar to the stylish surprise and sense of humour that form the undercurrent of the world represented by the well-known Belgian artists that preceded him, such as Magritte and Delvaux. This is probably one of the charms that fans of his work really enjoy.

Patrick Gerola catches everything he senses and every idea that floods into his mind, and never lets go of them. He absorbs all the colours he sees and all the sounds he hears in the daily life into his body. All the natural elements surrounding him are reborn in his works. There are many instances in which he is moved by the traditions, scenery, and customs of Japan, the country where he lives. It seems that his inspiration, in other words the sentiments aroused by what inspired the mind of the artist, are embodied as lines and colours in his works.The same thing happens with his culture.

The Manneken-Pis works, the statues in Brussels all Japanese people know, were reborn in Japan as gigantic Manneken-Pis works that are more than 2-meter highs. These are, as a matter of course, his ‘objets d’art’. In addition, these gigantic Manneken-Pis are completely covered by Gerola’s paintings and enjoying their second life. Born in Japan, these paintings are the most natural form of cultural exchange between Belgium and Japan.Getting back to the topic of “light,” Gerola says that the thing he is most conscious when creating a piece of art is “light.” Perhaps the imagined light seen in his imaginary scene on the canvas is one form of light on his mind.

When it comes to Belgian artists, he says his favourite is Pieter Brueghel. He supposedly visited villages in Belgium in search of the scenes that appear in Brueghel’s paintings. Although the world and light expressed in Brueghel’s paintings are attractive, what impressed me most during my first trip to Brussels was the lighting in the city. It was more of a type of illumination than light.They were pinpricks of red street lamps that caught my eye when the car drove into the city from the airport late at night. This was the very moment that I felt deep down that I understood the culture and climate hanging over these fantastic lights and the mysterious painters of Belgium.

That is why I thought I’d be prone to view Gerola’s paintings through my own take on Belgian lights. .

June, 2016 in Tokyo.