Escapism XIV, 2017

Maarten Demmink  

Graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Maarten Demmink (also known as Demiak) revisits the genre of landscape in the light of his contemporary concerns about environmentalism by the use of different mediums: paintings, mural wood sculptures, mixed media and staged photographs.

Through the motif of landscape shaped by human activity, he seeks to record the instability and the invisible, the time and the history, the traces left by nature and the cataclysms. His paintings looking like damaged vintage photographs of the series "The Big Blow" list some major natural disasters through the ages. Inspired by the Deep South, "Memoirs of Loss" is focused on ravaged houses, like an echo to a series of small sculptures of houses made in modest materials. Since the mid-2010s, he develops other themes into his series of landscapes, such as geopolitical considerations ("Escapism") or the memory of places ("The Book of Sand", "Ask the Dust") while pursuing his pictorial research by combining almost abstract or matierist elements ("Earth", "Labyrinths of Clay", "Urban Tissue").