About my work
The work is based on a realistic depiction of man and his environment, in which authenticity and truth are sought while at the same time questioning their relevance. In fact, it is less and less about man as an object, but rather as a subject of the conviction that the way of perceiving determines our ability to judge. I am convinced that our way of perceiving and the way in which images and information come to us is always colored in some way and maybe even flattered. Our world seems to be suffused with news and fake news, with facts and lies with truth and fiction. This seems to influence our judgment to a large extent.
However, our eyes are not all-recording cameras. What we perceive is driven by our ideas about what we see, our judgments, our upbringing and our own culture. In this time when social media almost literally consumes us and sucks our attention away with an excess of often irrelevant images, it means that we hardly take the time to really look, let alone come to our own judgment without thinking about it or being influenced.
In my last works I have looked for a possibility to deliberately influence the pattern of expectation and perception and to lead the viewer in a direction of gaze that may not be his own. Models, portraits, objects, after they have often been painted with great attention in the traditional way, are largely covered and painted over with a (mostly red) transparent paint, except for a few lanes and fields. This puts the objects to be observed in a completely different light, partly invalidates their existence and questions their image and relevance.
The bands of light and openness created in this way seem special enough to guide our gaze and function somewhere like a transparent curtain. The entire image is still visible, so that the freedom of observation remains and the viewer has a choice.
The work thus seems to show that our attention can clearly be directed to areas other than expected, even if they may be less interesting from a certain perspective.
Bart van Zweeden
The work is based on a realistic depiction of man and his environment, in which authenticity and truth are sought while at the same time questioning their relevance. In fact, it is less and less about man as an object, but rather as a subject of the conviction that the way of perceiving determines our ability to judge. I am convinced that our way of perceiving and the way in which images and information come to us is always colored in some way and maybe even flattered. Our world seems to be suffused with news and fake news, with facts and lies with truth and fiction. This seems to influence our judgment to a large extent.
However, our eyes are not all-recording cameras. What we perceive is driven by our ideas about what we see, our judgments, our upbringing and our own culture. In this time when social media almost literally consumes us and sucks our attention away with an excess of often irrelevant images, it means that we hardly take the time to really look, let alone come to our own judgment without thinking about it or being influenced.
In my last works I have looked for a possibility to deliberately influence the pattern of expectation and perception and to lead the viewer in a direction of gaze that may not be his own. Models, portraits, objects, after they have often been painted with great attention in the traditional way, are largely covered and painted over with a (mostly red) transparent paint, except for a few lanes and fields. This puts the objects to be observed in a completely different light, partly invalidates their existence and questions their image and relevance.
The bands of light and openness created in this way seem special enough to guide our gaze and function somewhere like a transparent curtain. The entire image is still visible, so that the freedom of observation remains and the viewer has a choice.
The work thus seems to show that our attention can clearly be directed to areas other than expected, even if they may be less interesting from a certain perspective.
Bart van Zweeden