Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Ben Sledsens paints the antidote to your cynicism. In his monumental canvases, this thirty-something from Antwerp transforms the banality of everyday life into colorful epics where childhood fables and pictorial reminiscences intertwine. If you are looking for contemporary art that flatters your urban neuroses and existential anxieties, look elsewhere. Sledsens creates something else: a parallel universe where beauty is not ashamed of itself.
Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Sledsens draws from the iconography of Henri Rousseau, Henri Matisse, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder to build his personal mythology. His compositions of calculated naivety immerse us in forests with geometric trees, interiors saturated with impossible colors, and hunting scenes where women replace traditional men. The artist himself admits: “I never work towards an exhibition, but from one work to another; in this way, a certain work inspires me to start another” [1]. This organic approach generates a coherent body of work where each canvas dialogues with the others, creating a fictional world that transcends the limits of the frame.
The Belgian painter develops a visual language that borrows from the masters while maintaining a disturbing singularity. His monochromatic lemon-yellow landscapes or his portraits with rosy flesh recall Fauvist audacities, but something else is at work here. Sledsens manipulates perspective with the nonchalance of a medieval illuminator and the technical sophistication of a post-impressionist. His characters evolve in settings where spatial logic gives way to pure emotion. When he paints “In the Yellow Forest” (2022), he transforms a simple undergrowth into a luminous cathedral where color becomes almost hallucinogenic.
This aesthetic of enchantment finds its roots in a childhood nourished by tales and legends. The artist explains: “The narrative dimension comes involuntarily from my childhood, where fables and mythology played a role. I have vivid memories of my grandfather reading me stories at bedtime, which left a lasting impression” [2]. This confession illuminates his entire work: Sledsens paints with the sincerity of a child discovering the world and the technique of a virtuoso who perfectly masters his medium. His foxes, his crows, his huntresses evolve in a humanized bestiary where each animal carries a symbolic charge inherited from Aesop’s fables.
The most interesting aspect of this painting lies in its ability to create a coherent cosmogony without falling into hermeticism. Sledsens develops a system of recurring characters: the Vagabond (who represents himself), the Huntress (embodying his companion Charlotte De Geyter), and the archetypal animals. These figures evolve from one canvas to another, creating a narrative continuity that transforms each exhibition into a chapter of a larger visual novel. Unlike contemporary artists obsessed with deconstruction and irony, Sledsens fully embraces the pleasure of storytelling.
The influence of fantasy literature deeply permeates Sledsens’ universe, particularly that of European folk tales that have structured our collective imagination for centuries. Like the stories of the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, Sledsens’ forests harbor mysteries where the ordinary shifts to the extraordinary. His compositions recall those moments of narrative suspense where everything can change: the calm before the storm, the unexpected encounter around a bend, the moment preceding the revelation. This particular temporality, which the artist himself calls “instances of climax”, transforms each canvas into a potential story.
In “The Huntress and the Vagabond” (2020), Sledsens orchestrates an enigmatic encounter between his two main avatars. The composition irresistibly evokes the universe of fairy tales: two characters face each other in a stylized forest setting, their attitudes suggesting a silent dialogue filled with subtle implications. As in the best tales, the visible hides the invisible, and the viewer becomes an accomplice in a story whose stakes must be guessed. This ability to maintain narrative ambiguity without falling into obscurity distinguishes Sledsens from many contemporary artists who confuse mystery with confusion.
The artist also draws from the literary tradition of the domestic marvelous, which transforms the familiar environment into a theater of extraordinary events. His interiors saturated with colors, his gardens with impossible perspectives, his living rooms invaded by lush vegetation evoke the aesthetics of fairy tales where magic insinuates itself into the most banal daily life. This contamination of the real by the imaginary operates in Sledsens with remarkable subtlety: his chromatic anomalies and perspectival distortions gradually impose themselves on the view, creating a particularly effective sense of familiar strangeness.
The folkloric dimension of his work is enriched by a deep knowledge of traditional European motifs. His animals carry the symbolic charge accumulated by centuries of oral tradition: the cunning fox, the messenger crow, the protective bear. But Sledsens avoids the pitfall of the picturesque by updating these archetypes in a contemporary visual language. His creatures, hybrid between realism and stylization, simultaneously evoke folk art and museum sophistication, creating a bridge between learned culture and collective imagination.
Sledsens’ relationship with architecture reveals an additional dimension of his creative genius, particularly visible in his way of conceiving the pictorial space as a habitable environment. Unlike painters who treat the canvas as a flat surface, Sledsens constructs true visual architectures where the spectator can mentally enter and wander. His compositions are organized according to a spatial logic that owes as much to the Flemish masters as to contemporary architects.
This architectural approach is first manifested in his management of depth of field. Sledsens layers the space in successive planes that fit together like the pieces of a complex building. His foregrounds often overflow with decorative elements (flowers, objects, characters) that function as entry thresholds into the image. His backgrounds are organized in calculated perspectives that guide the gaze towards carefully orchestrated vanishing points. This clever construction of space recalls the painted architectures of the Renaissance while maintaining a resolutely contemporary freedom of treatment.
The influence of traditional Flemish architecture is evident in his interiors with generous volumes and carefully cataloged details. Sledsens paints bourgeois salons with colored woodwork, verandas invaded by vegetation, bedrooms with shimmering wallpapers that evoke the Antwerp way of life. But he transfigures these familiar spaces by saturating them with impossible colors and introducing dreamlike elements that disrupt the usual decorative logic. A candy-pink living room, a bedroom with electric blue walls, a winter garden with geometric plants: Sledsens transforms domestic architecture into a fairy tale setting.
This architectural sensitivity is also expressed in the way he composes his landscapes. His forests are organized according to a rigorous geometry where each tree finds its place in a harmonious whole. His clearings design perfectly delimited theatrical spaces where his narrative stagings can unfold. His mountains and lakes create horizons that structure the pictorial space with the precision of an urban planner. This mastery of space reveals in Sledsens an intuitive understanding of the laws of architecture that considerably enriches his expressive palette.
The artist also transforms his canvases into true immersive environments thanks to his monumental formats. His large canvases (often over two meters) create a particular physical relationship with the viewer who finds themselves literally enveloped by the image. This environmental dimension brings Sledsens closer to contemporary architects who design total spaces intended to transform the sensory experience of visitors. His exhibitions thus become architectural journeys where each work dialogues with the exhibition space to create a global atmosphere.
The commercial success of Sledsens annoys some purists who see it as proof of a compromise with the art market. The prices reached by his works at auction (more than $1,000 for “Two Bathers” in 2022) testify to an enthusiasm that far exceeds the circle of initiates. But this popularity perhaps simply reflects the artist’s ability to create images that speak to our time without renouncing their aesthetic ambitions. In a world saturated with irony and negativity, Sledsens dares to propose a positive vision of art and existence.
His collectors are not mistaken: they buy fragments of utopia, pieces of dream crystallized in painting. Tim Van Laere, his historic gallerist, says nothing else when he affirms that “Ben creates his own world: an alternative universe, a kind of utopia” [3]. This escapist dimension of his work responds to a deep need of our disenchanted era. Sledsens offers a credible alternative to the prevailing pessimism without falling into naivety or willful blindness.
Sledsens’ technique is particularly interesting. He combines acrylic, oil, and sometimes spray paint to create textures of striking richness. His mossy greens, his powdery pinks, his electric blues seem to come straight out of an imaginary colorimetry manual. This mastery of the craft, acquired during his academic training, allows him all chromatic audacities without ever falling into arbitrary decoration. Each color finds its justification in the general economy of the work.
The slowness of his production (one month per canvas) reveals a perfectionist artist who favors quality over quantity. This artisanal approach contrasts with the industrial production of many contemporary artists. Sledsens paints like a medieval illuminator, accumulating details with the patience of a goldsmith. This particular temporality imprints his works with a visual density that rewards the prolonged attention of the viewer.
Sledsens’ recent evolution towards ceramic sculpture further enriches his plastic vocabulary. His painted vases explore the relationships between surface and volume, between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality. This technical diversification testifies to an artistic curiosity that refuses to be locked into a proven formula. The artist explains: “There is a long history of the form and function of the vase in almost all developed cultures” [4]. This historical awareness nourishes his contemporary research of a personal plastic language.
Ben Sledsens invents a painting of happiness that avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality thanks to his technical sophistication and his artistic culture. He proves that it is possible to create a popular art without being populist, an accessible art without being simplistic. His works finally reconcile beauty and intelligence, aesthetic pleasure and conceptual depth. In an artistic landscape often dominated by neurosis and self-flagellation, Sledsens offers an alternative path: that of assumed enchantment and the joy of painting.
- Camilla Boemio, “Ben Sledsens”, Curator Guide, January 2024
- Ibid.
- “Book of the week: Ben Sledsens”, Imagicasa, March 2025
- “Ben Sledsens is presenting new paintings and sculptures at Tim Van Laere Gallery”, Club Paradis, 2022
