'New works – Martijn Hesseling'

Martijn Hesseling made an impressive debut at Jaski Gallery. From Saturday, October 18, until Sunday, November 2, we took care of an impressive solo exhibition with new works. The official opening took place on Saturday, October 18, 2014. The artist was present.

The works by Martijn Hesseling go back to the tradition of painting. More precisely it has a similar visual result by using a different medium: varnish treated newspaper or book sheets which he applies on transparent plexiglass plates. Thanks to the treatment with varnish, the paper sheets become translucent and generate, when placed on top of one another, the impression of depth even on a bi-dimensional surface, just as several superposed layers of paint do.

The result of this creative process are collages – actually almost reliefs – in which images are constructed by mean of the overlapping and the juxtaposition of thousands of newspaper scraps. Their number, color and size are always different as well as the thickness of each paper layer. By playing with the innumerable combinations of these factors and the ever changing incidence of light, the artist is able to depict an infinite number of different subjects.

Similarly as in painting, the formal characters of Hesseling’s collages (the saturation of the colors, the intensity of the light, …) vary according to the environmental conditions and the position of the observer. This confers an extra visual veracity to his work, which acquires plasticity and vitality. Moreover, the fact that the most newspaper cuttings remain legible, gives his work a very particular time indication and with that a very actual dimension.