Over the years, Van Lint's plastic composition expands, is cleaned, and is laid bare: the articulations are more flexible and unbound; the luminous colors opt for less confrontational agreement. Through the passages of beautifully orchestrated colored planes - which Van Lint called "the seams"- the artist is unparalleled in dissolving formal elements and their interaction with color.

He continues, however, to find the key to his compositions not in the pure imagination, but in the valuable loot he gathers in his persistent diving everywhere: he is touched by a climate, the color of a land, the playful waves, the changing shapes of a sky, the morphology of a plant or a seasonal metamorphosis. In 1974, the year he underwent the removal of a large part of his stomach, Van Lint is honored with a tribute exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts in Charleroi.