Jan Theuninck

Jan Theuninck is a Belgian painter and poet born in Zonnebeke on 7 June 1954. Some of his texts appear under the pseudonym Orc. What makes him worth attention is the way he brings painting and poetry together around one persistent concern: exposing social injustice and the systematic violation of human rights.

He grew up speaking Dutch, yet he writes mainly in French, with occasional work in English. That choice places his writing within the French-language literary tradition and gives it a readership well beyond his home region.

As a painter, he works somewhere between minimalism and monochrome expressionism. He pursues simple, pure forms and, in some pieces, pushes monochrome close to an absolute. He is often linked to Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Miró, though the way he takes those references into his own idiom is distinctly his.

The same themes run through both his poetry and his painting: the Holocaust, peace and war, sexuality, colonialism past and present, modern slavery, and the relationship between the masses and society. He does not treat these as neutral subjects. His work is guided by social and political convictions and carries a clear pacifist stance.

The title of his best-known work, Iperita, points toward war, since it is the common name for mustard gas, a chemical agent used in the First World War. Beyond that, the available sources say little about his life. His legacy lies mostly in the consistency between his two artistic languages and in his persistent return to historical violence and inequality.