Pierre De Peet (Anderlecht, 1929 – Oudergem, 2019) is one of the Créahm workshops’ leading artists. He regularly spent time in the Brussels workshop for almost thirty years, from 1990 until his death in August 2019. Coming from a relatively modest background, his fragile health meant that school was inaccessible to him. He helped out in the fields, as he explains in his autobiography – “digging up beetroot with a spade and, afterwards, a farmer would collect them with a horse and cart” – and then joined his brother in the family baker’s, where he worked as a labourer for several years. In 1988, he was taken in by “Les Chataîgnes” shelter in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. He lived there for the rest of his days. In August 1990, at the age of 60, he joined the Brussels Créahm workshops. There he gradually developed a very intense Fine Art body of work, including drawings, paintings and etchings. Perfectly sound strokes, intelligent use of colour, narrative direction and standout poetry are the main elements of a pictorial language which often displays the most tragic dimensions and continually speaks to you in a soft and tender way seen nowhere else.

Every image has a model from which he takes his inspiration, resources and mediums. Every image is genealogical. During the last thirty years of his life, Pierre De Peet leafed through magazines and art books, trundling through scattered images, emotions and events, weaving his way through a selective chronical of life in its current state, for better and sometimes, for worse, people and bodies grasping the simplicity of existence, like a mirror image of our own pain and hopes. Such is the incomparable power of these images: the different way in which they are executed - still taking great pains to be meticulously faithful with absolute respect for their models - is not down to just simple movement of the creation or some kind of heavy-handedness, it is well-developed, successful and, at the same time, ascetic. It the image of the model, the unbelievable transformation of representation, his flight, his transfiguration, his freedom recaptured by the operation of his extremely fastidious gesture of replication.

Today, Pierre De Peet’s accomplished body of work is a wonderful illustration, a book of hours of visual emotions patiently, modestly and wilfully assembled by the artist at his work desk. He is inhabited by grace, the pure joy of drawing and colour, thus he has a view of the world which is both uncompromising and extremely gracious. But is it a view in the sense that the word view usually means a way of reading, of perception or interpretation? It is more of a manner of existence: Pierre De Peet (thankfully!) does not give away anything to read or understand. In his hut, without words, without science, even without any form of intention, he achieves the silent inadequacy of Simplicity which gives rise to the power of rebellion like a wave, from its origins and the entire history of Western mysticism.