Thijs van Geloven

Untitled
2016
mixed media
300 x 400 cm

Interests, references, associations, energy: digital projection and painterly touch come together in a studio like setting in the work of Thijs van Geloven. Van Geloven connects his analog interests to the digital domain. With subtle microscopes, he literally zooms in on Beamer’s and projects their test texts and promotional images.

In an intriguing fashion, Thijs van Geloven plays with our perception and binds semantic clarification with a pre-linguistic state of ‘that which is and shows itself’. In a complex entirety of phase transitions that, because they are translated in and through one another, become a complete dialogue, generated and brought into being by manipulated visual material from the surrounding world into broader sense of the term. In the acquisition of these materials, the Internet, for example, plays an important role, but the primary role has already been taken: by the paint as material, but also as the bearer of connotative meanings. This must not be confused with the assumption that the works was automatically fit into the tried and tested laws of that medium. The concept of aesthetics, derives stunning and confusing values from this ‘ugliness’, ‘cheap taste’, ‘beautiful’, or ‘ugly’. Through the Internet, the Chinese market (that portion in which Western design is copied in cheap, plastic versions) is consequently his primary supplier. We rarely see a simple image. All the images refer to each other and are the providers of meaning for the others, so that they are in a mediating position in regards to one another. His work is in ongoing process of the migration of the bearer of meaning to giver of meaning and vice versa. This impetus causes a continuous posting of inquiry, which oscillates between seeking truth and realizing realities. To quote a statement from Thijs van Geloven: ‘And that while you know that it is not the reality, but somewhere it is reality, but not the reality. It is a representation of the reality; it is an existing image and is therefore reality. Still, it is the reality that you are seeing, because you say what you say, but you know that it is not as it is, but as it might be.’

Untitled
2016
mixed media
300 x 400 cm