Jan Theuninck

Biography

Jan Theuninck’s native language is Dutch, but he writes poems in French and sometimes in English. It is an unusual choice for a native of West Flanders, and to my mind it already shows something of his character: he does not confine himself to one culture.

He was born on 7 June 1954 in Zonnebeke, in the West Flemish province of Belgium. No documents have preserved details of his childhood, schooling or first exhibitions, and I will not invent them.

His painting is abstract. It is usually placed somewhere between minimalism and monochrome expressionism. He likes bright, dense, single-colour fields and a sharp, clear edge between forms; sometimes a play of lines is added that recalls Joan Miró. He names Ellsworth Kelly and Miró as influences. His paintings and poems meet in their themes: the Holocaust, colonialism, pacifism, the position of the individual in the mass and in society, and also international migration. For that reason his work is classed as socially engaged art. The title “White Niggers” refers to colonial and present-day abuses, and in this connection he wrote of himself: “I am a white nigger.” Among his other works are “Homo multiculturalis T.”, which argues that the eclecticism of many cultures is worth more than any single one; “Wargasm”, or “The Psychoanalysis of a Warrior”; “Beyond the Limit”, conceived as a possible epistemological paradigm; and “Fagospatose”, devoted to the political situation.

A special place belongs to the painting “Holocaust”. It forms a single whole with the poem “Shoa”: in the spirit of ekphrasis, the verbal description of an image, the author makes a picture out of a word and a word out of a picture. He explained that for him the two are inseparable.

Among his best-known poems are also “Tais-toi!”, “Stalag Zehn B”, “Ypérite” and “Papirac”. His language is hard and stripped of superfluous words. The poems have been published in many languages, chiefly in American literary magazines and online journals, for example Poetry SuperHighway and PoetryRepairShop. They can also be found on the website of the memorial of the concentration camp at Moosburg in Germany and on the website of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. There is also his article “The Poet and Politics” in Poetrylifeandtimes, in which he reflects, in the form of questions, on a democracy where everyone must look in the same direction. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu clearly influenced his views. He is described as one of the cosmopolitan poets of Flanders. His paintings have been shown, among other places, at an exhibition connected with the G20 summit in Seoul.