Peter Hoijmakers
Peter Hoijmakers (1968, NL) attempts to express his personal relationship with the world in the classical medium of painting in an unorthodox manner. His works are usually portraits of people, always baroque explosions of colours, shapes and meanings. The eye is not seduced by beautiful, long brushstrokes, but becomes entangled in a figurative knitting made up of many layers of paint. At first glance, his paintings may seem “flat”, but you quickly find yourself in a physical experience of texture. Layers of paint are sometimes centimetres thick and materials such as eggshells appear to have been incorporated into them.
This use of materials is always related to the themes and subjects that Hoijmakers mixes in a collage-like manner. We see queens, dictators of the past, artists, people from the news, the painter himself or fictional allegorical human figures. The figures are rarely the centre of attention, as we find them entangled in a web of references to “high” culture, popular culture, religion, (art) history, the animal world, and so on. They are intimate reflections of Hoijmakers' inner world; carefully constructed layers of lived meaning.