TIME — History Repeats Itself

Traditional painter living in the future or as Ray Kurzweil would explain; The Singularity. After finishing my studies as a welder by day and a painter by night, i continued my creative training at the mental institution of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam where they discovered my obsessive eye for detail and a borderline-neurotic commitment to the relationship between art and technology.

I constantly find myself looking for different angles to approach my work. This often leads to an extended fascination for technology, particularly for teleportation, as it exceeds travel or transport, it is the freedom to be able to move without borders.

I see Portals as a medium, a doorway to another dimension. Experiencing the intervening substance through which sensory impressions are conveyed or physical forces are transmitted. (Trust me, i just googled this.) Less confusing examples would be photographs or smells transporting you back to memory lane or reaching altered states of consciousness through sexual escapades. There is portal potential in a lot of things.

Time, for instance, has this quality. It’s easy to lose yourself in the many fantastically paradoxical discussions about this ongoing subject, but for me it happens when I have the opportunity to free-dive in the ocean, feeling like I’m a part of a scene in Hook, flying from rock to rock in a submerged reality. Or during drawing sessions, moving around graphite on a piece of paper for hours, trying to find shapes.

Exactly THIS transports me to a state where time becomes obsolete. Maybe it’s because of this, that i never really put a lot of thought in the element time itself. That changed during this interesting period.

I’ve been spending a lot of it, time that is, in cathedrals. Although I did grow up in the bible belt I didn’t have a religious or ‘classical’ upbringing. But when you step into these haunting/amazing structures, you’ll feel something, no matter where you come from.

For me it feels like the closest you can come to a DIY; ‘how to travel back in time’.

You actually use a portal (yeah, just a wooden door..) entering an awe inspiring space, an event that feels like a 99% accurate mirror of the experience people had so many hundreds of years ago. It is the moment you step in, when you feel the acoustics rising, the temperatures falling, witnessing these ethereal man-made structures, prompting this universal feeling for what I can only describe as ‘being a part of something bigger’.

In my latest series ‘TIME PORTAL’ I’m using the physical medium of Cathedrals to create these ‘Moving Paintings’, transporting me back to my kid-self, experiencing this haunting feeling looking towards the ceilings in church. It’s strange as I never had a strong fear of heights but somehow I could always vividly imagine myself floating among these eerie heights, it made me feel anxious.

Much later in life I found that teleporting myself back over and over again towards the centre of anxiety as a little child, actually offers me the chance in exploring the core of my work and use it as a thriving force for my future.

Time traveling back in history, using a cathedral as a portal, a moving painting in an endless loop as history repeats itself.

It will be a series of two works. A light and dark version, each with a voice-over of generic sentences from the past looking at the future within acoustics from the actual cathedrals.

After the first two drops of PT.I and PT. II, The time portal series will be continued by GAN’s interpretation on these two man made structures in which i will dive deeper in my next Medium post.

Thank you for your time and patience,
CAEP