Tjebbe Beekman
I stated once that, as an artist, I am kind of a lazy philosopher; I have to look for the right questions, the answer lies somewhere in the dialogue between the viewer and the work.
Artists will eschew the question “What does it mean?” not because it’s meaningless, but because the work itself is the clearest answer. An ‘answer’ denotes unambiguousness rarely found in modern art. There exists an inherent uncertainty spread between the artist, the concept, the work, and the viewer, generating connections our experience recognizes as meaningful, even as they evade the descriptive constraints of language. It is this interaction which Tjebbe Beekman (1972, the Netherlands) masterfully emphasizes. His paintings’ complexity, the multifarious layers, references and materials, confront the viewer with concepts as they mentally manifest—not a sharply defined entity, but a network spreading diffusely through our mind, to be physically experienced.
