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BIO
Nicolas den Hartog explores boundaries and different compositions of dimensions. Although time seems to be the protagonist in the process, the result is always spacial. Different approaches to time and other dimensions get consolidated in a tangible, physical object. Use and integration of the digital and the physical, with their own speeds serves the questions. Next to the process, also the techniques are direct representations of the prehistoric, historic and posthistoric. The use of reflective materials makes the works come out of themself and gives the observer a key role in generating the reality of the object.
The question of dimensions was risen at an early age and ever since became a center point of contemplation. Our senses are to be perfectly attenuated to our needs for survival. A complex system shaped by the universal tendency towards entropy. Altering energy consumption through altering complexity and generating information, shape. Yet still so much noise gets absorbed by our consciousness. Much of it stays on the background, unconscious, yet not without consequence. These characteristics of reality can be found very explicitly in the artworks of Nicolas den Hartog.
Many of the works start from simple systems permitting interactions between materials and natural forces as gravity and electromagnetism through chemical reactions. The coming into being usually consists of something you could call a primordial soup, or one of the first phases of existence. Through contemplation of these objects, Nicolas den Hartog will carefully derive inventive techniques in order to shape simple forms and steadily add more complexity and information to these objects of chaos. Thus the chaos, the womb of reality, slowly gives birth to artefacts. The hands and mind of the artist add complexity and information. We see the primordial soup gaining complexity and information by applying energy. Here we touch one of the mysteries of reality: what energy really is. Where the energy comes from and what it is, is shrouded by the veil of Maya.
Recognizable and understandable elements to soothe the human mind in between the violence of nature. No ethics, no morality is to be expressed here firstly because they are fashionable and fictional. Contemporary truths do not change through societal eras. They transcends our ideals. Natural disasters do not select, neither do natural wonders. They are.Instead they recall to our most primal being, it’s the noise, the chaos, nature that calls for emotions and these become understandable through the gentle and modest addition of definition, shape and thus culture.
Inventing religion, laws, and all other fictional rules and institutions all have the same goal: make the brutality of the dimensions we inhabit bearable and workable. Which is an amazing human feat. Yet it also deprives us from our most primal being. Bringing back this almost completely lost contact with nature through emotions is the first goal of Nicolas den Hartog. Breaking through dimensions is a means for there were none in the absolute beginning.
The final integration happens through combining his music with his graphics. Sound is yet again intangible, yet it steers the reshaping of his visual and physical arts through the ideal realm of coding.
One is ideal, the other feels material.
Apollo dances with Dionysus.
Enjoy your visit in the artists' soul.