‘it’s something that isn’t real, but could still be real somewhere’

I was 14 and sitting on a stool in the record shop in Terneuzen, wearing headphones. The needle was placed on the record and crackled familiarly in the silence. Then came the first notes — raw, strange and uneasy, so different from anything I’d heard before. I didn’t know if I liked it, or if I was even allowed to like it. I only knew that I was moved by something for which I have no words. I still recognise that moment in the way I look at things and work.

I grew up in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, with boundaries that are clear yet unspoken. ‘Just act normal, that’s crazy enough’. Here, I learnt to look, but also not to always show everything I saw or thought. As the past grows ever larger, the unspoken boundaries fade and I step over them. In that space, I dare more and more to see, feel and create my own world.

My work arises from a desire to discover the unusual within the everyday. Or the other way round. When I look with my feelings and feel with my eyes, I realise that nothing is necessarily what it seems. Then I can let go of my thoughts and take with me whatever moves me. I make different moments, impressions and images merge into something new — until I see in it what I feel. 

I respond intuitively to what moves me and arouses my curiosity, searching for that feeling I had back then on that stool in the record shop. Without words, I now recognise the unexpected, embrace it and embark on a new discovery.

What was once a detail can become a landscape; what is abstract can evoke something familiar. Not a record of reality, but an imagination of an experience. This is how I create new images. Until they move me and meet my idea of beauty, then I give them to the world. 

I invite you to slow down and wander. To see, to feel and to imagine. Not to understand immediately, but to be moved by something for which you have no words yet.

yours sincerely, jeroen