Bram Demunter – Collector and thief of thoughts, books, pictures, times and creatures

Subtitle: Bram Demunter is a Belgian artist, who changes the art world with his figurative works. Although it violates all the rules of contemporary art, it is all the more important and surprising. He creates his own world full of fantasy and poetry. Historical references are presented in a contemporary guise. Welcome to the magical world of a collector and thief of thoughts, books, pictures, times and creatures.
Bram has his upcoming solo exhibition from 8.2.2025 until 26.4.2025 in Tim Van Laere Gallery in Rome.

Cyte: Tell me a little bit about your work. I’ve been following your work for a couple of years now. And finally we have the time talking about your work. To me, there’s so much going on. Can you tell me a little bit about the background of the pictures and what are you intending to say?
Bram: I just finished all the works for the show. I started painting them last year at the same time as I was reading Don Quixote, which became in a way the starting point for these works. Don Quixote was reading adventure stories until he could not see the difference anymore between the real world and the one in his books. That’s the secret to a good adventure. The same archetypes and figures keep resurfacing in my head. They are my companions.
Cyte: So it’s about you in a way?
Bram: There are always elements of yourself if you paint or draw. The starting point was the book. But in the further year, other classical books and mostly epic poems started enter the work. The Ramayana, Paradise Lost, The song of Roland and Beowulf, classical stories and poems who connect and communicate with each other even though they were written in a very different context. The same goes for painting, a work from Simon Marmion and a 2000 year old mosaics or cave paintings in Indonesia. can talk to each other. I just constantly look in books, go to museums and and steal everything I like. I put it in one big story. Everything always deals with love, death, sorrow, happiness and nature. That’s all you need to build a world.
Cyte: But is everything related to each other? Or is it more random that you pick lots of things you see in that phase, in that time you paint the pictures and they come together in that work? Or are they related to each other?
Bram: In the end, everything becomes one epic poem in my head. I work for a long period on a work. Each day I have different moods and interests which I think you can see in the work. Two stories on the painting become one when you connect them. They are living and changing constantly while I’m working on them. I continuously keep overpainting them. When two paintings are standing next to each other I can even start to see similarities and continue to work on them like it’s one work.
Cyte: Some of the paintings remind a little bit of a contemporary version of Hieronymus Bosch, in a way. And there seems to be lots of little details and symbols. Is that the case? Are there hidden symbols in your pictures? Or is that something I just gathered from the idea of seeing some similarities of Hieronymus Bosch?
Bram: Bosch was living in a time where people could read those paintings in a different way. When I paint a snake I think about National Geographic documentaries, horror movies, Paradise Lost or just a funny snake. They all have different connotations and the viewer can easily see which meaning I used. There’s lions, there’s snakes, there’s people, there’s skulls, and there’s trees. And for me, it’s very obvious that they are there because they are part of our collective memory.
Cyte: Okay, I understand. It’s not like an intended message. But for me as a viewer, I mean, it’s overwhelming. It’s so much going on. And of course, at one point I asked myself, okay, are there hidden symbols and things? But as you said, it’s more like a flow of fantasies and ideas, which are coming in your head together while you’re reading and looking at things. And it’s all a process which comes out in one painting. Do I understand that right?
Bram: Yes, and it’s also like a synthesis of everything I’m occupied with. When I was a kid, I made encyclopedia, I searched for drawings and pictures of apes, boats or clouds which I then cut out and glued the isolated subjects together with a title: “book of clouds” or „book of apes”. I think that was already a kind of world building. It’s a bit like a biologist who has to describe the world. I have the feeling I’m still doing the same with the paintings that I have collected, every morning I still cut out all the pictures I like to paint from the newspaper and then I just throw them around in my studio.
Cyte: That’s wonderful! I need to understand, because obviously it’s not something which explains it by itself. You know, it’s something you look at and it’s, as I said, it’s overwhelming and it’s actually great because it’s such a wonderful world you’re tearing people into. And therefore it’s good to get to know a little bit about your thoughts and where all these ideas and things come from. At the same time when I was looking at your work, it’s, I mean, it is very different from all the, let’s say, from lots of other contemporary artists. Because the pictures are so full and creating such a wonderful world. Your work doesn’t show a big ego, like lots of other artists seem to have, or at least a few of them. It almost feels like I would needed to be protected from that world outside, all these creatures and all these stories and all these fantasies and ideas which are coming out. How do you see yourself? How do you feel about the art world?
Bram: All I want to do is sit in my studio and just steal with my eyes. I pretend to be Don Quixote or Beowulf, and I live in my own little world. There are a few painters that reside constantly in the back of my head; like Monet, Bruegel, and Ensor. Everything has already been done and when I paint I enjoy looking at the masters even more.
Cyte: So Rome could be also a good inspiration as a place for future paintings!
Bram: I was very impressed when I saw the Roman mosaics last year. And of how big and powerful they are. Some of these mosaics I also just interpreted in my work. They’re also there.
Cyte: So how many pictures are you going to show in Rome?
Bram: About 10 paintings and some drawings.
Cyte: Like studies of the paintings or…?
Bram: They are works on their own. They have a similar feeling, but I think faster when I draw. I often destroy them when I feel I’m making too many decisions at the same time. There’s no hierarchy in the works; paintings can influence drawings or the other way around.
Cyte: Do you find it good to work for a show as a goal or is that something which puts you under pressure?
Bram: No, because I had a lot of time. I think I worked a full year on those ten paintings. Every time I’m working on a show I feel as if I’m directing a movie or writing a book with the same characters, like a multiverse. For the show in Antwerpen I wrote a little encyclopedia about all the interesting mountains, trees and rocks I found in literature, mythology or in real life. This show is about figures like Mad Meg from Bruegel, Don Quixote from Cervantes, Ganelon from the song of Roland and Beowulf.
Cyte: Somehow your alter ego, in a way.
Bram: Yeah, for this show, at least!
Cyte: Has it changed a lot for you to be represented through a gallery?
Bram: I can work all day and have a good rhythm, it’s good to have structure. I’m not working in the middle of the night anymore. I have my daily routine. The people from the gallery are very encouraging. And it’s nice to have somebody to fight against or to give some feedback. And there’s a good connection between the artists. I think a lot of the artists from the gallery have similar interests.
Cyte: Maybe it’s silly to ask, but how is somebody who collects your pictures? What kind of person is this? Who’s the person who’s interested in your pictures?
Bram: I can only say how I look at the paintings. There’s only so much you can say about someone’s biography or about someone’s thought process. Sometimes it’s just about some yellow paint in the corner that can make me very enthusiastic. And sometimes you just paint a dog, and then you paint the tree, and then suddenly there’s a painting.
Cyte: No, no, no but it’s obviously, as you said, for yourself, what interests you in something might be just a little detail which triggers you. So it’s the same for people who look at your paintings and they see something in it which triggers them. I was thinking maybe you have to be a kind of dreamer to love the pictures you do because it seems to be like a dream in a way.
Bram: You have to dive in them a little bit.
Cyte: Thank you Bram to make us dive into your work.