Jelle

Van Den Heede

Jelle Van Den Heede's abstract collages showcase harmonious arrangements crafted from aged paper. Inspired by modernist design, the complex details of her creations engage viewers through the use of faded cyan and weathered yellow shades, cut into circular and rectangular forms that guide the eye across the composition. Conceived spontaneously, these pieces function as expressive visual diaries, reflecting the experiences of a contemporary artist in the modern world.

Collage is a personal attempt to write poetry by using pieces of images, colors, shapes, and other visual elements, rather than words. I employ old materials and look for what has been forgotten, abandoned and what has lost its purpose. I look for the details that were overlooked, I reinterpret them, and I make an effort to give the small things a deeper significance. In this process, coincidence and intuition play a significant role, which is another reason why collage appeals to me so much. When I'm creating collages, I enter a state of flow or hyperfocus where my mind is silent and just the experience in the present moment matters.

Jelle Van Den Heede

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Jelle creates images that are like tactile dreams. Jelle creates a poetic world where only feeling counts, and everything else disappears. Her work is minimalist and fragile, inviting the viewer to come closer and discover her world. In that world, her gaze often rests on the small. The beauty in the details that are often overlooked in our existence. Her images exude simplicity, tranquility and wonder, but for the attentive viewer they also bear witness to a certain layering and mystery, hidden in a feeling that accompanies an image or in a title that gives something away. In essence, Jelle is looking for the perfectly balanced image that strikes in its simplicity. She therefore sees herself as an 'image collector'. Someone who collects fragments of images, dissects them and composes them into a new image. It is an intuitive way of working in which she tries to translate an underlying feeling into an image that reveals just enough. Two themes are very present in her work. Human nature and the surrounding nature. Both are unmistakably connected and in her work these themes and the tension between them regularly overlap. By leaving out everything superfluous, by reducing her to her essence, Jelle tries to understand reality. As a result, her work often balances on the border between the figurative (what is recognizable) and the abstract. Her images are extremely personal solutions in the sense that the search for beauty and simplicity offers her a personal way out of the chaos of reality and out of the inner chaos. That chaos is universal and typical of life / being human and by making and showing these images, Jelle hopes that they touch, refer to other realities and also offers the viewer a way out. Jelle therefore likes to leave the exact interpretation of an image to the viewer. “For me, the beauty of creating is mainly in looking, discovering and observing the small. There is a hidden layer of life in the details that we pass by more often than we think about. I collect the small in order to give it a greater meaning.”

Courtesy of Jelle Van Den Heede

Jelle Van Den Heede was born in 1978 in Kortrijk, Belgium. She is currently based in Gent, Belgium.

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