Robin Vandersteen

Artist statement

My name is Robin Vandersteen, a Belgian artist from Hasselt. My practice begins with my inner world and with a search for ways to understand and process emotion, chaos, and change.

As a child, I often lost myself in comic books. Because of my dyslexia, long texts felt less accessible, so images, short fragments of text, and imaginary worlds became an important way for me to experience and understand the world. That visual way of thinking has stayed with me ever since. Cartoon-like forms, intense colours, and playful figures therefore return again and again in my work.

Through my art, I explore the tension between my inner child and the adult world. Growing older brings responsibility, expectations, and social pressure, while I still try to preserve a sense of curiosity, fantasy, and wonder. My work exists somewhere between those two worlds.

Art is also a way for me to look inward. Mindfulness, personal growth, spirituality, and the healing of emotional and family-related patterns play an increasingly important role in my life, and naturally find their way into my work. Emotions such as fear, sadness, love, confusion, and hope often become the starting point of a piece. By making them visible, I can bring the chaos in my mind outward and eventually find calm within it.

I mainly work with mixed media because it gives me freedom. Painting, drawing, spray paint, and different materials are built up intuitively in layers. Sometimes a work remains untouched for months until I return to it with the same emotion. At other times, I add a completely new emotional layer. In that way, a work can carry several moments of my life at once.

Contrast is an essential part of my visual language: colour versus black and white, fantasy versus reality, childlike forms versus adult emotions, control versus chaos.

Imperfection also plays a central role in my practice. Through constantly confronting my perfectionist side with my dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ADHD, I have had to learn how to let go. For me, a mistake does not need to be corrected; it can become a new starting point. Just as no tree in nature is identical or perfect, I do not believe that people or artworks need to be perfect either.

My work does not try to hide imperfection, but allows it to exist visibly. I want to create space for wonder, recognition, and emotion, and to invite the viewer to look at themselves and the world again with some of that childlike openness.