Céline van den Boorn paints over the people in the images she uses. They literally disappear from the frame and are absorbed into the surrounding landscape, which suddenly takes center stage. Olphaert den Otter does not even paint the people. In his work, only the landscapes remain, which do bear the traces of what people have done there. Both artists take current images from the news as their starting point. The usually unsettling subject, with the human as the protagonist, disappears in their paintings through their intervention, while traces of human presence remain subtly visible.
Strangely enough, the absence of people does not make the works empty. On the contrary, the very absence leads to an intuitive search by the viewer. And this search raises questions. What is not visible makes the works more complex and layered. The viewer has a task: to take a stand, to empathize, to fill in the blanks, perhaps even: self-examination.
Céline van den Boorn (1978, graduated from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht) works in Amsterdam and is a lecturer at the HKU. Her work is held in various museum- and corporate collections, such as Fenix, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Fries Museum, the Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, and NAVO Brussels.
Olphaert den Otter (1955, graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie) works with egg tempera, often in large series. One of these, the ‘Stal- en Kluis- morfologieserie’ comprising 127 works, was shown in 2008 at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen Rotterdam. Parts of the extensive ‘World Stress Painting’ series have been shown in numerous locations, both domestically and abroad. In 2016, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen acquired his ‘Tondo Mondo’ work, a large painting with a detailed depiction of our planet. In 2020, Museum Belvédère Heereveen presented a major retrospective, ‘Earth and World’.