Apart from mentioning his Dutch origin, his rigorous academic training and the whole of his "intimate" career as an artist facing nature... I mean UNIVERSAL NATURE in capital letters: to speak about August Bernaerts one must penetrate into a very deep well which, like an iceberg, is revealed suddenly and unexpectedly through his subconscious and is convincingly expressed in his artistic creation... although in an unfaltering way and faithful to his personality, that is to say: profound.

Paradoxically, the academicism of Bernaerts perishes when faced with his overpowering autodidactic self.

While the artist's surrealistic, super realistic, figurative and abstract trends are expressed and intermingle in his work, they are rigorously governed by the solid criterion that he essentially suffers for humanity and its obvious "lack of harmony with nature". This is the essence of August Bernaerts and the consequence of his painting: his works are deeply charged with compassion for the world, the concern that only from the introverted isolation of "special" persons can they be discerned as truly natural "rarities". In the case of a painter such as he is, it is expressed by a complex speech transmitted to us through his language of colours and forms:

Displayed with emotion and emerging from an ethereal and spiritual world, the colours are the constant hallmark of his expression as they flow through grievance, fear, sadness, hope, desire or joy...

The clouds are a good "thermometer" of his state of being and of the "story" that accompanies the criticism he depicts in each work; he tells us of turbulence, wars, passions, peace, dreams and even memories.

The human forms are sharply defined when he wants them to be the protagonists, so too is the poignant expression of a poor woman begging, while the body is forgotten...

The light, in contrast with the greys, greens, ochres, blues, blacks, reds... presides over the whole, in conflict with them and revealing mystical inspirations, possibly as a last resort of hope.

The architecture and the real objects, although our artist has great domination over them, only appear in symbolic form like the message in "the broken atmosphere", in which a demolished building is compared with the decline of our planet. - Could it be that we, the creators, are also the sons of a father and the brothers of everyone and of everything that surrounds us?

I read in the work of August Bernaerts a deep sentiment which, from its microcosms, is fraternally being offered to us, like a persistent morse code message to humanity; the culmination of his work resides understanding the message and in the deep admiration that forms part of discovering it.

Signed: Luis Marcelo de Valenzuela
Vice-president of the organization for the defence of historic-artistic and natural heritage.