About

My work is about value that refuses to be pinned down. I paint, draw, make prints, write and play music, but whichever medium I choose, the question stays the same: what happens when meaning is allowed to remain open?

I call that territory the obscivium: the space between what we know for certain and what we cannot yet name. It is where my paintings come into being, from free figurative work to abstract series such as Obsciviat. It is also where my writing lives. Some of it is serious reflection on freedom, autonomy and the way class and money shape our bonds. Some of it is ‘pataphysical ceremony: grand crosses, obituaries and cartographic analyses that, with a straight face, undermine the very logic they appear to rest on.

These two voices belong together. For me, humour is not an escape from seriousness but a way to break open fixed patterns of thought. Whoever laughs at an absurd decoration suddenly sees how self-evident we find all the others.

Under the heading Arte Indeterminata I investigate how art can withdraw from the idea that everything has a price. I don’t make anti-art; I look for art beyond economics. The community art project Van Onbepaalde Waarde (Of Undetermined Value), with its self-designed banknotes, makes that question tangible: what is something worth once we stop expressing it in money?

In zyphex this inquiry takes on a form of its own: an ongoing series of images with titles like illegible codes, surrounded by invented quality marks and institutions. I call it an incomplete guide to transience, visual discomfort and consolation. The image refuses to be catalogued, even though it carries a registration number.

I am self-taught. As a boy I wanted to go to art school, but that road stayed closed. Imagination always weighed more for me than a conventional career, so I set out to search on my own. That headstrong route shows in my work: I would rather wander than follow a fixed line, because that is the only way to find new paths.

I live and work in Haarlem. Since 1993 I have exhibited regularly with the Haarlem artists’ association KZOD, at venues including De Vleeshal, De Waag and the cloisters of Haarlem City Hall, and in 2015 in Ghent. I also take part every year in Kunstlijn Haarlem, the city’s annual art weekend, and make music with the improvisation collective De Filistijnen.