New show Martijn Hesseling in our gallery: ‘NYT & Tabloids’

From Saturday 20 October until Sunday 4 November, Jaski Gallery organized the exhibition ‘NYT & Tabloids’ with works from Martijn Hesseling.

The official opening of ‘NYT & Tabloids’ took place on Saturday, October 20. It was Hesseling’s second show in our gallery. As the title of the exhibition already told, his fascinating collages on plexiglass this time were created with paper pages of The New York Times and tabloids.

Martijn Hesseling was born in Ede, Holland in 1971. From 1991 to 1997 he studied at the Academy of Art in Enschede and graduated at the Dutch Art Institute.

His work goes 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.