Tijmen Steenvoorden

Text written by Alena Alexandrova, June 2023

Images are never still, they travel between different media and change in the acts of their articulation on the surface of a painting, in film, or a literary text. Tijmen Steenvoorden's painting practice focuses on the metamorphic nature of mental images memories, dreams, imagination. They are in a constant flux, and the gesture of continuous painting comes closest to reflecting their mobile, oscillating, cloudlike quality. Paintings are usually considered finished when they arrive at one form, or a constellation of forms, and are fixed in one state, which is considered final. It is impossible to capture a dream, one can write it down, or paint it, but at the moment it is fixed in a medium or signification, it eludes us. Memories are not records. They can be an anchor point, but one that is always in motion. To picture them, to paint them, to translate them, means to render visual their process, and not only their image. It means filling gaps, layering and creating palimpsest textures, and letting surfaces melt into transparency. Overpainting on a single surface defines the image not as stable, still, or finished, but as open, and as mirroring the dynamic nature of memories. Rooms, faces, cities tremble and oscillate in the space opened between imagination and the hand, the brush, and the flow of paint.