If we look closely we can see that Luc Dondeyne has over the last decade been on a slow but dogged quest to develop the most personal pictorial style that could also be described as the most impressionist. His firm hand combined with nonchalant brush strokes applied in bright and often unusual colours, act as a jigsaw puzzle to create a total image, that can only be pieced together by taking sufficient distance from the object. In contrast to the 19th-century French impressionists, whose light and firm touches were completely dependent on rather pretty, but almost meta-painted representations of the ever-changing light, Dondeyne, in terms of content, applies his touch in order to reveal the (unfinished) storytelling aspect of the picture. In itself, there is nothing new about this. A painter like Michaël Borremans for instance often spices up his pictures with a surrealistic enigma in which the viewer is triggered to complete the story that is taking place on the canvas - however absurd it may be - in his or her way.
With Luc Dondeyne there is a lot more going on. An explicitly, unearthly and dark melancholic atmosphere that - through the strange use of an impressionist way of painting - exudes from a great number of his paintings, ensures that the viewer actually believes in the as yet unfinished story. And that's not all: sometimes this belief is so strong that you actually forget the canvas itself and you plunge completely into this recurrent, uncomfortable melancholy. In this respect, the work of Luc Dondeyne is not just about purely pictorial aspects of figurative painting, but just about (still) strong universal human feelings.
(Thibaut Verhoeven)