Where all are loved and being loved. With this van Veen wants to not only express the ominous but also show the interaction and possibility’s of an community.
Within the exhibition 'The Breeze, The Embodiment Of Water' the shadows or persons occurring in the paintings are depicted in artificial light, both neon as well as the white TL. It says something about our gaze towards nature or our surrounding. The make-able world who’s on its end. Like Bruno Latour talks in Face à Gaïa, 2017, about the static landscape, which has become fluid in the last couple of years. Not any longer we are this small creature in a overwhelming sublime nature, but the giant crushing it. (An entity seemingly so lasting turns out to be vulnerable. A feeling of decay.)
For example the triptych, 'Neon Shadows I, II & III' (2021), shows an esthetic image with a ominous glow when you come closer. The skin and the texture of the painting arises, accentuated by the hard stroke upwards in the eye of the face or the contours of the shadow posing as an angel. Almost like a trip where everything seems real and clean and collapses after a few seconds.
On the other hand shows 'Love = Love' (2021) a certain kind of beauty expressed within fabric. The social interaction in between contemporary signs, shows an other side, more one of a bigger community. Where all are loved and being loved. With this van Veen wants to not only express the ominous but also show the interaction and possibility’s of an community.
The fashion related subject come from his interested in the message of the medium. In this case the clothes; the human becoming the pedestal of the several context layers by wearing the pieces. Within his works he goes in on codes and contemporary currents. Within a collaboration with Museum Boijmans van Beuningen & The New Originals they already collectively expressed this progressive language embedded in clothes. With Museum Boijmans van Beuningen being a vanguard of this and the clothes of The New Originals embodying this gesture, van Veen made a performance together with several paintings where the creations off The New Originals became a uniform for this message: “We move as One”.
The paintings seen in 'The Breeze, The Embodiment of Water' appear digitally as snapshots when standing in front of them, but Van Veen attaches importance to the paint, brush stroke, surface and believe that when seen in real life they are more likely to give an experience of delay inherent in painting (you can see / feel the time it took to create the image) . The narrative of the works is not only based on texts and performance writing by van Veen, but definitely also on the surroundings. The romance of both the country Turkey as its capital Istanbul flows through in the works. The attention and space for rituals impressed van Veen. From there, the slippers lie in space as a gesture to shoot into the slippers and take on the artist's gaze. After that, you can take another viewer to another place by taking the slippers there.