Christophe de Fierlant is a contemporary Belgian artist with no shortage of plastic resources. Christophe de Fierlant has observed everything there is to know about contemporary art, having been a student of mine many years ago when I was teaching modern art at the Institut Supérieur d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art in Brussels. But he has made his choices: to entertain the eye of the beholder through a kaleidoscope of shapes, lights and colourful contrasts, often with texts of his own. A poet to boot, the artist has no equal when it comes to bringing out all the connections and oppositions between polychrome and graphic signs. And so, from his initially figurative and almost totemic beginnings, he has confronted forms and contrasts of colour. Hence his beginnings, indebted to artists such as Dubuffet and a certain Art Brut. Then, beyond figuration, Christophe de Fierlant felt intoxicated by colour, this time freed from all representation. He created daring gestural abstractions, reminiscent of the great masters of abstract expressionism such as the Frenchman Georges Matthieu and the Belgian Englebert Van Anderlecht. Always aware of innovative movements, Christophe de Fierlant pursues what seems to obsess him: the combination of form and colour, with verbal inscriptions drawn from his poetic inspiration. His plastic deployment came when he completed his current masterpiece, in a way his ‘abstract’ Guernica, ‘Où en est la bataille?’, a canvas measuring more than twelve metres by three, which sweeps polychrome forms through an absolutely mastered gestural rhythm, a veritable volcanic and quasi-ejaculatory magma, currently installed at the Ferme de Mont Saint Jean in Waterloo. A painter like this should be recognised as one of Belgium’s finest contemporary artists! As his biographer’s informed comments in this book clearly demonstrate.