BEYOND PHOTOGRAPHY/Ruud van Empel

Text by Rommert Boonstra

After a successful period as a production designer, around 1995 Ruud van Empel decided to begin producing autonomous work. Among other things, that decision led to the series of computer manipulated photographs that was given the title The Office, in which a solemn corporate director in all his glory has assumed his place behind a large desk in an imposing black and white space. In a serious manner the images try to make him look ridiculous by the myriad of unlikely requisites that appear. It is the Director's Office as a symbol of might – and helplessness, stern and laughable at the same time.

A couple of years later he took the drastic step of setting all humour and irony aside, producing work which resurrected beauty, which had formerly been such an important concept for art – not the beauty who has burnt her face, about which the Dutch painter Lucebert wrote, but the beauty that is 'a joy forever', a beauty that offers no excuses for being beautiful, that is a delight to the eye, and to the soul.

From hundreds of photographs he made himself he began to assemble impressive images of children in lush and often exotic natural settings. Their clear structure permits the photographs to be taken in at a single glance, but on a second look one can lose oneself endlessly in the immense wealth of details, which make the work more realistic than reality had ever been. Each little flower, each leaf, each reflection of light and water has been set at precisely the right place during the lengthy process of assembling the image, and there it has stayed. The somewhat older photographs of the children sometimes awaken the suggestion of a certain menace. What is going on under the deceptively beautiful surface? But in the latest work complete innocence reigns, which is all the more emphatic thanks to the natural background.

'Fantasising is of the greatest importance,' Van Empel says. 'For me, making art is diving deep into the caverns of the mind and returning with things that you didn't even know were there. But after the fantasy you still have to realise what you have dreamed. The picture is built up step by step. You must repeatedly make decisions, and that implies a certain tension. You are playing with transparency, introducing a point of light, making everything as picturesque as possible. The work is an ode to life. Thus this is not just about reality, but about the aestheticising of that reality. It is about the underlying beauty. Every form of vulgarity must be avoided. The sound of children playing on the street, that is where the enduring value lies. If you depict yearning and peace, once you have gotten beyond all the caverns of corruption, when all of the nonsense falls away, then you can grasp the essence.'

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© COPYRIGHT 1996 - 2012 BY RUUD VAN EMPEL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED