A field, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm, 2024

Exhibition view, OPEN STUDIO, The Crooked Studio, Rotterdam, 2024

LOVING PICTURE, installation at Prospects, Art Rotterdam 2024 - Photo's by Luuk Smits with thanks to the Mondrian Fund

untitled, oil on canvas, 55 x 80 cm, 2023

Slit, oil on canvas, 130 x 140 cm, 2023

Loving Picture started from an interest in veiled queer sexuality and chat-room decor aesthetics. The video uses found footage of empty chat-rooms as well as posing figures, masked out by silhouettes of picturesque landscapes. The sequence is paired with a soundscape of chat room sounds, including pop music, typing, clicking, moans and whispers.

Codified and pixelated the bodies become objects, like in lush still-lifes. With tags like #here4u it becomes clear that through whatever screen you’re watching, you have a private window. You’re alone, so is he. Even though it speak to real-life desires, it is wrong to equate these virtual encounters to real ones. A virtual veneer covers up the experience: it’s not sex, it’s not nude, it’s not intimacy - it’s a picture of.

Growing up gay in a small town, meant visiting porn websites and chat rooms to experience something that seemed unattainable in real life. You spend so long picturing how it would be, that you live on with this imprint, placing love and intimacy at an exalted, virtual level. Loving Picture functions as a testimony of how a real desire for contact gets lost in pictorial translation. The video continues my paintings' research into the instrumentals of images and their dilution of intimacy.

Full video is available on request.

untitled, oil & acrylic on canvas, 100 x 140 cm, 2023

Ruins, oil on canvas, 110 x 160 cm, 2021

Sunscreen, oil on stretched bedsheet, 50 x 70 cm, 2021

boyfun, oil & acrylic on canvas, 35 x 60 cm, 2020