Juxtaposed, added on one against the other in the harmony of their lights and their colours these vignettes capture a moment. They arc evidence of the painter’s interest in the paintings of the old masters that lie has for a long time copied.
Draguet Michel in Chemins de lecture, 2004
It is said that the artist is inspired by the Bible but no religions feeling seems to be implicated in his approach. It is rather a question of a spiritual force at the service of a pictorial technique exploiting all the resources of the subject. The artist paints in oil on wooden panels. Each of his works tells a story. It is up to the spectator to decode it. Numerous pictures in small format edge the painting with larger pictures in the angles of which appear other small pictures destined, one could say, to insist on the importance of different details.
Colette Berthot L’Echo, 29 mars 2003
Bern Wery was formed modes of expression that are personal to him and which allow the subtle creative mechanisms within him the time to materialize at the tip of his painting tools. In this way lie unites his pictorial strategies with the rhythm of his mental activity giving a natural priority to what Kandinsky named so well the ‘necessary interior’. Then emerge, almost unnoticed by the artist, worlds and situations that haunt his imagination and his memories: landscapes contemplated during journeys, tactile and olfactory sensations seized in the Brabancon countryside where lie has chosen to live, Biblical scenes nurtured by an inventive reading of sacred texts.
Serge Goyens de Heusch, septembre 1991 – Introduction de l’exposition à la Fondation pour l’Art Belge contemporain
This is why, meticulously or, on the contrary, with extreme rapidity, carefully dissecting, or widely sweeping, lie paints with broad lines his skies, his woods, here softening lines with ink and there masking them, composing his scenes with the fine touch of rich fabrics, the unctuousness of certain lights in the half-tones of an Autumn day, suggesting with the help of scarcely sketched out silhouettes the presence of closely bonded apparitions; clusters of people, looming from obscurity or in the grip of stagnation, surrounded by convolutions reflecting far off and even more indistinct people.
Eddy Devolder, 15 octobre 1989
If Bern Wery had been born in another era lie would not have been a painter but a prophet; or perhaps a painter-prophet. Since 1 have known him his painting has never ceased to announce our imminent reconciliation with the Promised Land.
Ruben Forni Introduction de l’exposition, 1989
The paintings and drawings of Bern Wery share the same brutal strength; an impatience of execution which goes to the essential, exploits the contrasts and invigorates scenes whether of the beach or of the martyrdom on Golgotha – by nervous, silhouetted presences.
Wim Toebosch AAA, 1988