JCJ Vanderheyden (1928)
Light, space and time make us aware of what surrounds us. For JCJ Vanderheyden, this concept is at once both the starting point and the conclusion. Vanderheyden focuses on reality and art history, examining what our eye sees and what we take in. A clear blue sky, an endless horizon or the world as a stage. Throughout his body of work over the years, set themes recur, which the artist reuses and rearranges in new ways, adding a level of significance to the temporal aspect of his work.
Vanderheyden steadily expands his oeuvre, using whatever medium he deems necessary: a canvas, a photo, a film or an inkjet printout of an existing work. In the nineteen sixties, Vanderheyden examined the relationship between sensory perception and the tools we use in the process, studying the functioning of not only sensory organs, like the eye and the brain, but mechanical tools like the camera obscura, camera, movie camera and rasters. 'The visual arts appears to us more and more as a world of reproduction,' says Vanderheyden, 'a concrete double world, a continuous playback phenomenon in books and catalogues, on postcards, slides and electronic images.'* Every form of reproduction puts the subject of the image in a different light and is, in Vanderheyden's eyes, a new original.
* De Muze als Motor II: Beeldende Kunst in Brabant 1945-1996, Tilburg 1996, p. 134
