Bob by Margriet van Breevoort at Kunsthal Rotterdam, March 18, 2018.
‘My work is on the border of beauty and creepiness, somewhere between reality and fantasy. By adding these contradictory elements together, I create a game of attraction and repulsion.
The body of my work consists mostly of figures, which have been sculpted to have an hyperrealistic likeness, but always keep some strange abnormality. They are a visual rendition of an emotion or feeling with a specific situation and can evoke references to stories or personal experiences and memories.
It is not my intention to impose ideas or viewpoints. The viewer decides what he sees and how he interprets it. An artwork in my opinion also doesn’t need a profound significance or conceptual context to be a good work.
I strive for utmost perfection, a faithful and perfect representation of my imagination. But the contrast between this perfectionism and alienation nonetheless provides a psychological conflict. It looks real, but it can never be so.
It is a constant effort to mislead the viewer. To seduce him into believing something impossible. To believe in a world without restrictions.
In this world these hybrid or mutant characters come to life. They get their own character, often with a name instead of a title, but give no further clarification or story. With their melancholic expressions they evoke a vague feeling of loss and vulnerability.
I place them without plinth in a premeditated or staged space, and sometimes in places you do not expect. As if they just came walking in and they placed themselves there. This makes it all the more credible and makes the viewer almost a part of the work.
They are also not just puppets. They contain a certain presence, but at the same time they are introverted figures. They are completely immersed into their own world, sometimes staring in the distance, sometimes with eyes closed. And sometimes even literally turned inside themselves.
In the end they’re just an object. But the hesitation that occurs at first sight continues to fascinate me. At that moment, they come very briefly to life.
We, as humans, are now in a position to manipulate nature to a large extent (think of biochemistry). Almost everything we can think of is already possible..
Being an artist, for me, is to have the potential to create my own world and bring it to life how strange or unfamiliar it may be.
But the older I get, the more convinced I am that the world of my imagination is not as weird as I thought. So much is possible nowadays, that you might wonder what is still normal.’