After being accepted into the Rietveld Academy with large abstract paintings, I didn’t make any abstract works for years, till 2022. It (re)started as a way to finish the leftover paints of my art students, and turned into an obsessive “game”. I realized however, that this game was more than getting to a balanced composition or pleasant colors; it connected me to my personal aesthetic, my feelings, and even my love for painting. More than any other works I’ve made, my abstract works are where the rational meets the emotional, where I make decisions according to rules unwritten.

In this exhibition there are roughly three groups of works:

Connection

I have been playing with the remains of people’s discarded furniture, craft projects and DIYs. Adding a precise piece of colour can make trash into treasure. Connecting oak to birch, connecting triangle to rectangle, thinking of life as a puzzle with infinite solutions.

Escapist Landscapes

Just as people are wired to see a face in two dots, there is something about horizontal shapes that can easily evoke a landscape. The Escapist Landscapes are often abstract, sometimes hint at the figurative. They are always landscapes in the metaphorical sense; spaces for the eye to wander and for emotions to be stirred and to settle.⁠

Plyers of Enlightenment

My friend Marieke Meijer told me over dinner about the research she was doing into the precise workings of communication between brain cells. The researchers grow a neuron on sapphire, and this lonely neuron only communicates with itself. When the researchers want to see the effect of a certain molecule, they can pick it up with “optical tweezers” or plyers made of light. My mind was completely blown. Science can be poetry, while showing us how perception (and poetry) is dependent on chemistry.

You can read Marieke’s article here: New study on balancing synaptic strength in Nature Communications – CNCR