2006 - 2010
Self portrait films
This four-piece series reinterprets the traditional landscape painting. Plots of land, clusters of trees and babbling brooks are removed from their intimate two-dimensional format and transposed onto the three-dimensional contours of the artist’s own face.
A fresh and surreal twist is given to romantic landscape painting’s obsession of recreating the world while simultaneously also being part of it. In this way the romantic landscape genre is re-examined from the perspective of self-portraiture. The series consists of four photographs and one short experimental video.
For the Light series, Van Veluw covered his head with strips of light-generating foil. Photographed in total darkness, the highly radiant bright blue light produced by this material, allows it to stand out like an autonomous object.
The features of Van Veluw’s face have disappeared, only its shape remains discernible through the mass of light strips. Light becomes form and exists independently from its base, the original subject. This ‘invisibility’ of the human subject informs the formal qualities of these images.