Martijn Schuppers
My paintings are rather like facades whose reverse sides we are now acquainted with. It is the realness of the materiality of painting itself that makes my works turn into their own counter-images.
Martijn Schuppers via The Nature of Painting, catalogue, 2006
Are these photographs on canvas or paintings? Images of the moon, close-ups of sponges, or a windswept beach?
What Martijn Schuppers (1967, the Netherlands) makes is surprisingly new. And what he makes, he mostly makes by dissolving, he paints (paint) away. On a colored base Schuppers applies a second layer, and then partly removes it using various techniques such as solvents or an airbrush. The resulting canvas is filled with extraordinairy shapes exhibiting a strange sense of depth—a dynamic illusionary design.
