Neither formalistic nor representational, Moens’s work ignores the distinction between purely abstract painting and a painting that includes elements of significance such as words and images. Instead, it conducts experiments with paints, surfaces and signs, through which ambiguous appearances and spaces—at once actual and illusionistic—are being produced.

Moens’s work not only reflects on and responds to the physical preconditions of his paintings. As much as it is an inner exploration, it is also directed outwards, examining the consequences of making an object, of manufacturing a commodity in the world of late capitalism, of a saturated art market, of mass production and consumption.
Unsurprisingly, Moens’s moving between the inside and outside of his art practice, between the inside and outside of painting, can be traced in works that are not paintings, specifically in the machines/kinetic mechanisms he created in recent years. These works remind of Moens’s early site-specific installations, but they are also a key to and a metaphor for his painterly project.

Eccstatic shows more than two hundred works from the oeuvre of Rik Moens from 1991 to 2021, enriched with installation shots and essays by Ory Dessau and Thibaut Verhoeven.