Hans Laagland

Hans Laagland (Koersel, Feb. 18, 1965) is a Flemish painter specializing in still lifes, landscapes, portraits and nudes. Laagland is self-taught.

Laagland’s artistic mastery is staggeringly versatile and all those sides he knows how to apply accumulatively: reinforcing each other.
There is currently no one in the world who possesses such a vast palette – or rather, such a synthesis of skills – that we encounter in Laagland’s oeuvre. We may have to go far back in history to encounter masters with the same extensive baggage. That immediately explains why he is mirrored by Rubens and Rembrand, albeit for the wrong reason. Outwardly, Laagland appears to be copying or mimicking “the style” of them, but those who have an eye for the many layers in the work and the painter’s synthetic ability know that Hans’ mastery achieves something we should really have considered “lost knowledge” for at least a century and a half.
Indeed, modern artists excel at sublimating one or two of the skills Hans possesses, and we therefore fail to see that these few skills are still classic artistic skills. We call them “modern art,” when they are nothing but diluted or isolated classical skills that used to be part of a comprehensive body of knowledge and relative to each other. They were not, as in our time, available in isolation.