The question that still follows me might be this: what does it mean to see truly, and is such seeing even possible for beings as conditioned, partial, and interpretive as we are?

I grew up in an environment where perception carried enormous weight. To see the world wrongly wasn’t simply an intellectual mistake; it had existential, eternal consequences. Eternal bliss or damnation, no less! Truth was not presented as something provisional, unfolding, or approached through uncertainty, but as something fixed and already revealed. The task was not to discover through questioning and curiosity, but to submit to it.

I reject that framework pretty firmly, but I think the urgency around seeing never left me. In the studio I’m mostly just focusing on the formal aspects of painting, but outside of the studio is where my work emerges in my mind. There I wrestle - though that sounds heavier than it is - I play with questions that come out of that early atmosphere: What do I actually see? How much of what I think I see is shaped by prior commitments, desires, fears, or inherited frameworks? To what extent is all seeing mediated and incomplete? And what does that mean?

A lot of my work emerges from that tension. I no longer believe in a final, unquestionable revelation - to me, revelation is not the final answer, but the beginning question; the raw, uninterpreted phenomenal world. I remain fascinated and, at times, haunted by the seriousness of perception. Painting has become my way of slowing down looking, of testing appearances, of trying to make visible the instability between what is there and what we project onto it.

One image I remember doubting very clearly was not a painting or photograph but a biblical image I had carried in my mind since childhood. I grew up being read the biblical scriptures in a seventeenth-century Dutch translation whose elevated, archaic language gave these texts a certain distance and grandeur. The language itself almost functioned as a veil. Later I tried reading the Bible, as if it were a book rather than a library, in a contemporary translation, intending simply to read it from cover to cover. When I reached Leviticus and Numbers, something shifted. For the first time I could picture what I was reading: the slaughter of goats and sheep, the blood, the burning flesh, the smoke rising from the altars, and again and again the insistence that God delighted in the aroma of these gory rituals. That contemporary language stripped away the aesthetic, theological, and cultural distance. Suddenly I could actually see the scene. And I remember it unsettled me. It clashed violently with the elevated image of God I had inherited. I had not yet lost my faith, but I remember it felt perverse to me.

It’s so fascinating to me! The elevated God of the great theologians and apologists, called the first cause, the ground of being, eternal and outside of time and space, and whatnot, but in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament for Christians) God is this all-too-human, not like God as this ultimate reality or something, but an all-too-local deity, and literally not that far away - not out of space and time - just a bit up there in the clouds being delighted by burned goat flesh. How macabre! The God of Christianity started to kind of look like Zeus, Odin, and all the other deities from the pagan religions the Christians I grew up with looked a bit down upon.

That was such an important moment for me. It taught me that mediation changes perception, and that what we see often depends on the frame through which something is presented. A change in language made a familiar image newly visible, and once I saw it differently, I could no longer unsee it.

No, no devotion haha, there’s a serious and also playful irreverence in my spirit. I like, and also find it important, to turn certain symbols and images on their head. Desecrating and shaking up symbols and imagery that have been upheld, or to consecrate images that are oppressed or trod down. But in some way that might paradoxically be quite a religious attitude. Especially in the Abrahamic religions, there’s a big suspicion of image-making, to the point of iconoclasm. Suspicion in theory at least, I think; I see believers clinging as tightly to images as anyone. I share that suspicion though, but I think we cannot do without images. We won’t be able to see at all. I think serious, irreverent play with (civil) religious images, or images at all, is for me the healthiest approach to images. It prevents staring and makes better seeing possible, not seeing truly, that’s impossible in the absolute sense, but seeing with vitality. What I mean by that is broadening and deepening seeing. Seeing something precise and clearly is an aspect of that. Seeing a bigger picture void of details is another. Seeing imaginatively, seeing critically, seeing empathically... When I think about it, that might be a main goal for me with my paintings: preventing stare.

What interests me is that these images occupy a strangely spiritual space while presenting themselves as entirely secular and practical. The language of hygiene, optimization, relaxation, and wellness often borrows, whether consciously or not, probably not, from much older spiritual and religious traditions of purification, transcendence, and redemption. A meditation or deep focus YouTube video with ocean wave sounds, or an air freshener advertisement, may seem banal or commercial, but they often promise something much larger than their immediate function. They offer cleansing, renewal, relief, purification, peace, a kind of secular temporal salvation. That overlap fascinates me because it reveals how persistent these desires are. Even in highly secular, materialist consumer culture, the longing for transcendence does not disappear. The promise of spiritual purification becomes physiological hygiene. Contemplative organ music before a church service is like guided relaxation through ocean sounds on YouTube. I was interested in how aesthetically similar these promises can become. The soft gradients, atmospheric light, floating forms, pristine emptiness - all of it borrows from traditions of transcendental imagery while redirecting them toward consumer reassurance. There is irony in that, of course, but also genuine fascination. I do not see it simply as cynical manipulation - nor do I think these old spiritual traditions are manipulation-free; to the contrary - but I think it reveals something deeply human: our recurring desire for purification, calm, relief, and some temporary escape from psychic noise. Perhaps because of my religious background, I am very attentive to these migrations of spiritual language into secular commercial culture. They feel like disguised theology.

I want to push back a little on the premise of the question. Although I often end up using degraded images, I’m not necessarily attracted to them. Not all of my work begins with degraded or unstable source material. Some series come from high-resolution photographs I made myself, like the cheese paintings (CASUS), while others emerge from found material, collages, screenshots, or low-resolution online images simply because those are the conditions under which the source exists. The degradation is conceptually interesting to me, but apart from my first two series - Exorcise From a Safe Distance (2015) and Suck-kissing Remora and the Sloughing of a Skin (2016) - I don't usually choose to work with images because they are degraded. Often, it is simply a limitation imposed by the image itself. For example, with Paintings Proving Angels are Really Watching Over Us, I would happily work from higher-resolution source material if it existed. Often, the cloud formation I need occupies only a tiny fraction of a larger photograph, so enlargement inevitably introduces low resolution.

What interests me is not degradation for its own sake. I would rather work from more refined source material, but since I am working with degraded pictures anyway, I am, besides being inconvenienced, also interested in what becomes visible when an image stops pretending to be a transparent window onto reality. Low-resolution images, awkward screenshots, or degraded reproductions might expose the fact that every image is mediated. They might show that seeing is never clear, clean, and immediate, but that seeing is always filtering, translating, reducing, contaminating, and reconstructing. Unstable pictures might reveal how much seeing depends on what we ourselves bring to the act of looking.

I don't know if I agree with myself haha. I think I've changed my mind. I do not think paintings are inherently superior to digital images. They just have a different function, although there’s overlap in what they are capable of doing. Many digital images, to me, are extraordinarily powerful. In fact, I’ve been really moved more by digital images flashing by on my Instagram feed - victims of war and genocide, of capitalism and the war on climate, for example - or even by something extraordinarily ordinary and cute, like an Instagram post with a 100-year-old couple who are still excited about each other or whatever, than I’ve been moved in museums by paintings. Much of my work begins with found images, screenshots, JPEGs, or material encountered online. What interests me is not a hierarchy between media, but the different conditions of attention they create.

A screen image is usually optimized for transmission. It moves quickly, circulates endlessly, and competes with thousands of other images, and that’s its power. A painting is much less efficient. It occupies a specific place, has a specific scale, and asks for physical presence. Another aspect is that painting, by definition, relates to the history of painting. The fact that, because of that, a painting is perceived under different conditions of seeing than a screen image makes the two distinct.

What fascinates me is that painting is a remarkably primitive yet almost magical technology. A few pigments, really colored dirt in a way, suspended in oil on a piece of cloth or wood, somehow become a face, a cloud, a memory, a political event, or evoke a lot of feeling. The means are incredibly simple, yet the effects can be profound. There is something alchemical, almost like transubstantiation, about that transformation.

I often work from found images, video screenshots, or combinations of found material and imagination. Sometimes, as with Paintings Proving Angels are Really Watching Over Us or Theology of a Dead Deity – Zombie Salvation, the work begins with collages I make from collected images or my own photographs. I usually ‘sketch’ digitally with Microsoft Word. The image or collage itself carries the clue for how it wants to be painted. The visual language does not come later as a conceptual decision I impose on it. It is more like an immediate recognition of a visual logic within an image. Certain images ask to be rendered with sterility and distance; others ask for something more classical, refined, crude, minimal, atmospheric, or expressionistic. It is difficult for me to fully explain how I know. The recognition feels almost self-evident. It is so immediate that the question can feel a little like being asked how I know that 1 + 1 = 2. Often the deeper conceptual framing only becomes clearer afterward. The initial decisions are quite intuitive. I recognize something in the image, and at the same moment I recognize the painterly conditions it requires in order to become itself as a painting.

Especially after the response to the previous question, and usually looking at paintings as a robber, I don’t feel like I can be too didactically demanding toward the viewers of my work. I do not think a viewer needs to arrive at exactly the same interpretation I have. However, I am not indifferent to meaning. The ideas, associations, and conceptual structures behind the work are very important to me.

I often think of my paintings as invitations into a specific conceptual site. I hope viewers recognize at least some of the questions, tensions, associations, or ideas that motivated the work, but I do not want the paintings to function like riddles with a single correct solution. For a long time, I was frustrated by the limitations of painting. I would become excited about an idea and then realize that a viewer might see something different. Over time, I became more comfortable with that. Paintings are not philosophical essays. Yet I still care deeply about the ideas that generated them. That is one reason why I take titles, series titles, texts, and interviews quite seriously.

I do not see the paintings as standalone artifacts. They are in conversation with language: the titles, texts about the work, and interviews I have done. Not because painting is a weak medium that cannot stand on its own. It can. But you’ll see less. A dish can stand on its own. A symphony can stand on its own. A forest can stand on its own. But we often experience more, notice more, and recognize more when language helps us name what we are encountering. We often overlook or don't quite see or recognize what we can't name. Language can change what becomes visible in a painting. I think human meaning-making, or perhaps even meaning recognition, is almost always a collaboration between our senses and language.

So if there is a correct way to look at one of my paintings, it is not to arrive at the same conclusions I did. It is to enter the conceptual territory the work opens up with curiosity and generosity, and allow the image, together with the language surrounding it, to expand what you are able to see and think about.

At the moment, I am actually inspired by something a bit unusual, maybe. While working on a series that's still in progress, with the working title Press-Release, I knew I was engaging with a subject that is politically quite sensitive and a bit divisive. Because the series deals with images relating to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, I expected disagreement and some pushback. What surprised me was not that backlash occurred, but how productive and inspiring that backlash could become. Rather than treating those reactions as something external to the work, I became interested in feeding them back into the series itself. The criticism - well, that's not the right word, smearing - pushed me to deepen, complicate, and further develop the very body of work that had generated those responses.

Some of humanity's darkest realities - war, death, political oppression, censorship, violence - can become sources of artistic inspiration. Artists have always tried to metabolize reality, including its most painful aspects. It is not the kind of inspiration associated with feel-good, airy, and happy feelings. It is a more weighty, earthy, serious one.