A Belgian painter, Hugo Van Goethem is best known for his exploration of movement as a central theme in his work. His artistic journey took a decisive turn in 1996, when he was invited to create a live series of paintings on stage at the Flemish Opera in Antwerp and Ghent, accompanying a performance of contemporary classical music by German composer Wolfgang Rihm. The experience revealed to him the difficulty of giving sound a visual form. Unlike the action painters who often sought to capture an emotional state inspired by music, Van Goethem realized that sound itself resists direct translation into paint. By the time the painter reaches for his materials, the tones have already faded, replaced by new ones.

Determined to stay ahead of sound rather than follow it, Van Goethem began developing a new visual “notation” to grasp what he called the fleeting essence of sound. The experiment led to Landscapes, a series that transforms shifting visual impressions of travel through nature into painted records of movement.

A third line of development in his work is found in the series Comic Figures. At first glance they may appear playful or whimsical, but for Van Goethem they are also about movement—capturing. What happens between two frames of a narrative sequence. In this way, they form a synthesis between his earlier explorations of sound
and his later meditations on landscape.

Hugo Van Goethem’s practice thus bridges performance, abstraction, and figuration, always circling back to the question
of how movement—whether of sound, vision, or story—can be captured and transformed into painting.