JCJ VANDERHEYDEN

The fifty-year oeuvre of JCJ VANDERHEYDEN, who was born in Den Bosch in 1928, is all about looking; the image that the brain receives through one or more lenses. The same motifs recur constantly in his work: the window and the eye, frames, grids, mirrors, the cell and the horizon. He uses them to focus attention on definition, division, concentration and dispersion, emptiness and reflection. JCJ VANDERHEYDEN’s art is influenced by the many journeys he made, which caused him to develop an independent attitude to life, led by chance and intuition. From his aeroplane window he studied light, time and space. He was also captivated by the clarity and the tranquil spaces in works by Vermeer and Cézanne, but at the same time by the grids of newspaper pages and the pixels of printed photographs. Although he began as a painter, after 1967 he developed a ‘general art’ focused on ‘an intensification of all areas of life’. In different media – photography, television screens, prints, film, photocopies, sound and computer images – he analyzes observation and compels the viewer, too, to look with real concentration.