Tribute to Rubens

A painting by the Antwerp artist Sam Dillemans has been hanging alongside Peter Paul Rubens’s world-famous The Descent from the Cross since 2018.

A Tribute to Rubens: The Descent from the Cross is a contemporary interpretation of the original. The work is unique, but Dillemans painted it with the utmost respect for the master. Pastuous layers of paint form crevices, valleys, mountain chains and abysses. The artist seems to have carved it into the canvas, rather than paint it. Whereas Rubens’s altarpiece inspires admiration, the spectator is startled and even perturbed by Dillemans’s canvas. It portrays pain, the fragility of love and hope.

Or how the 21st century engages in a dialogue with a quintessential example of the baroque.