Portrait de Serge Goyens de Heusch
(Portrait of Serge Goyens de Heusch)

1978, oil painting on canvas, 81 x 65 cm
Coll. Musée L, Louvain-la-Neuve (Serge Goyens de Heusch donation)
N ° inv. 1411

From 1947 to 1987, while post-war art obliterated the nobleness of figure and discouraged more than ever any portraitist’s ambition, Gaston Bertrand – although he was a leading figure of the abstract movement - produced more than twenty major portraits. His models were generally art lovers who were enthusiast about his work: lawyers, bankers, art historians or literary men, industrialists, businessmen or the wives of these men.

Gaston Bertrand always based his work on preliminary sketches that he drew during the long portrait sessions with his models. These sketches were drawn with ink or pencil and sometimes watercolours. A closer look reveals that the physical and moral resemblances are deliberately fragmentary and somewhat surprising due to the staging and the touches of light that support them. Resemblances are always lured away from their illusionist function. As Bertrand openly declared, he was not aiming at satisfying his model’s personal affirmation but rather at realising “a plastic equivalent, some translation inspired by the moral and physical characteristics of the model, transcribed by the creator with a purely creative aim having its own purpose”.

The artist kept some distance with respect to his model; he selected some striking elements which mysteriously became signs intended to give sense rather than to describe. The overall impression is that, by creating some sort of abstract portrait, the artist actually painted the idea of a person and only kept a few physical elements as well as some indications regarding his model’s social or professional status.