Publisher's Synopsis
The first monograph on the major contemporary artist
Jeff Kowatch was born in Los Angeles in 1965. He has lived and worked in Brussels for the last twenty years. As a child, he experimented with copying the great masters of European painting. At the age of eighteen, he decided to devote himself to abstraction, and since then he has infused his work with the state of immobile plenitude that he developed during his meditation and spiritual quest. He has developed a demanding and subtle technique, inspired as much by Mark Rothko and Brice Marden as by the Flemish painters, from whom he borrows his mastery of glazing. On the canvas, he can overlay up to a hundred layers of paint, endlessly scraped, sanded and covered, which acquire an almost mystical depth and transparency. His works are inhabited by patches of colour that press and agglomerate on the support. This gentle contact creates a sensual harmony and a delicate tranquility. Yet it is the relentlessness of the invisible layers that presides over this palimpsest-like softness. Organised into series, his work also includes numerous drawings on paper in oil pastel and, since 2017, oilbar on dibond. His works forge numerous connections with literary and spiritual sources of inspiration.
