Jean-Marie Heyligen (Ath, Belgium, 1961) is a plural-form artist: painter, etcher, sculptor. For over forty years, with endless patience, he has played the role of talking about  important things in a way that is beyond words – stunned faces, abandoned and naked bodies, Indians from another world, knights from another time, all drawn into the irresolute enigma of shapes, strokes, materials, colours, images and things. The long-lasting theme of Jean-Marie Heyligen’s work is organised knick-knacks, constantly metamorphosing due to everything we secretly go through from childhood to adulthood.

Jean-Marie Heyligen is also one of the pioneers of what we at the Trinkhall call “the movement of workshops.” From the very outset, a resident at the André Livémont Home (Beloeil), where he still is today, in 1980, he met Bruno Gérard, a young artist who, just at that time, had been employed by the Home as facilitator of a painting workshop. The two young men were of the same age – in their twenties.  Who would be the master? Who would be the student? Nobody knew.  But what was certain, was that Jean-Marie Heyligen’s first works – with their transparency, accuracy, power and mysterious autonomy – shook up the apprentice facilitator’s expectations and assumptions and, from then on, in amazement, he found all the resources of partner teaching skills that he continued to implement, firstly at Livémont, then at Pommeraie (Ellignies-Sainte-Anne), where for thirty years,  he developed one of the major European workshops.