ARTIST STATEMENT

In urban environments we are inundated daily with information and hectic impressions. I seek a balance between this outer city life and my private world. In my studio I create the tranquility I need to be in direct contact with myself. Studio space is a recurring motif in my oeuvre, painting.

It is a starting point and workplace ,all at once: the occasion, site ,and dimension of my investigestions. When I am working on a project I go out into urban spaces, photograph architecture, and then I transform those images into paintings, altering color, light and atmosphere. My large paintings show architectural spaces where corridors, rooms, or staircases seem familiar, but cannot be placed in a specific site or certain time.

I leave the spaces remarkably empty so that it seems all context has been erased. The images are filled with emptiness. I am fascinated  by the airless and lifeless neutrality of so many contemporary man-made spaces like empty airports, lobbies, and hotel rooms. Empty rooms, like those in office buildings, are biological homes  for a while and then we leave them. These anonymous environments generate suspense-the feeling that behind every door, around every corner, a possible threat awaits.

Originally, I explored the habitat of these temporary homes, rendering the private world visible and accessible to outsiders. Recently , I have moved from the inside world to the façades, emphasizing architecture as a sort of alienation between people in our modern society, a society in which people do not know neighbors, in which the architecture creates a sort of loneliness, a poverty of contact between people. My work thus asks people to consider the politics of buildings and the responsibility of architects in creating  these economic spaces.

Cécile van Hanja