Vermeersch’s painting, as Luca Cerizza writes, stems from the transposition on canvas of intentionally abstract photographic images. Using a grid system, they are patiently and painstakingly translated into color, into tone (to use a term that applies both to painting and to music). In line with a certain Pop-Minimal-Conceptual way of thinking, that through a process-based practice sets out to question the role of the individual-artist-author, Vermeersch defines a series of rules a priori, which he then follows with almost mechanical discipline. This process, which the artist himself has defined with an oxymoron of “hyperrealistic abstraction,” produces paintings in which the almost total monochrome shifts into another tone, as if to reveal the mutable nature of the pictorial matter.

Almost from the outset Vermeersch has amplified the scale of his painting, first through performative practices where the painting expands in time and space, then in a series of wall paintings (since 2001) and spatial interventions, where the expanded chromatism establishes a dialogue with architecture and the natural landscape, becoming atmosphere, space, landscape or – more precisely – their stylized illusion. Also outside the museum and the gallery, Vermeersch’s hues translate a temporal dimension through imperceptible gradients that vibrate like long drones, like an infinity of harmonics that occupy a space-time. In those projects of an expanded painting, which not by chance nearly always follow a horizontal movement, “time becomes space,” as Gurnemanz tells Parsifal in the first act of Wagner’s opera.