While developing the enVisual Dialogue body of work in the beginning of
2015, Weijers enabled himself to reinvent his artistic process. In a continuous
need to disconnect from and to question the existing on the one hand and to
discover new perspectives on the other, Weijers developed a series of
game-changing works of art. The perception of the bigger picture on developing
art for the stimulation and improvement of the overall discussion and inspired
by pure optimism, Weijers developed his own personal lexicon of tendencies,
techniques, and tenets that inspired and stimulated his conception of art as a
channel for self-expression and spontaneity in the course of the development of
his current works of contemporary art. Challenging furthermore the conventional
traditions of painting, the enVisual Dialogue body of work is in its reliance on
material, process, and a spirit of innovation, to question storied conceptions
of art-making and the contemporaneous cultural climate.
Weijers devoted his work exclusively to pursuing colour and form within
surface and space as well as the use of light and transparancy within this
project and researched into the transformation of the materials following a
differing approach of shaping objects with a wide variety of mainly
unconventional materials in order the endeepen his understanding and horizon on
the use of conventional forms of collage with the aim of recreating and
imagining objects and paintings that transfer symbolic values of consciency and
morality as well as square minded and black&white thinking patterns in order
to provide the basic visual impuls to revive dialogue. A process that
necessitates a certain hermeticism. This categorical, occasionally autistic
character of his work as a painter, requires that he seeks out and finds a
direct engagement with so-called reality in other fields. Weijers is eminently
political and intellectually engaged, as well as a reflective individual, who
for precisely this reason keeps his work as an artist free from avowals and
metaphors. The work itself is enough of a metaphor and proclamation.
It seems as if his paintings have been formed by means of multi-layered
alternating applications of paint, by scraping paint off, adding materials and
grinding the surfaces. The melancholy inherent to these pictures emerges only
every once in a while, when the eye perceives the interplay between the
skilfully composed cold and warm transmitted translucent coloured hues. The
viewer is regularly transported into expansive diffused scapes while interacting
with a minimal amount of conceptual clues and in which almost nothing is
obvious. As far as the content of the artist’s work is concerned, it is man who
is the focus of his attention and his central idea, while the art form excels in
his most direct and primary reflections transformed into drawing. His
calligraphic elaborated, fluid, refined, mature and determined line winds to
end up forming an originally modified structure of a human figure, reduced
mostly to a head, which is an indispensable and distinctive attribute of
Weijers his artistic opus. It is the most meaningful element with which the artist
visualizes a reasonable reflecting but also sensitive man, as is revealed by
soft, but taut forms. The characteristic continuous lines, tiny and precise
graphism represent the artist's variable artistic interactions with the
painting surface and confirm his personal penchant for simplification of form
that definitely encompasses the complexity of an invisible, but ongoing activity
within a person's inner self; his changing thoughts, a kaleidoscope of his
emotional states of mind and social feelings which fully objectify the
elaboration of a human figure through the author's subjective, but also
generally argumented imaginary world.
Weijers evidently and intriguingly considered interactions of light and
space in this divergent series of works, cubist shaped constructions from
scattered pieces of glass and porcelain are representative of his conceptual
investigations. These mesmerizing, layered compilations of a large variety of
unconventional materials, broken into pieces and applied over a cubist
composition, challenge the viewer’s perception. These works appear to capture a
force behind the conceptual eager to break through its surface and test its
constitution. Weijers covered these objects with semi transparent resin forms
that seem to vibrate under their crumpled up and destroyed fuzzy monochromatic
surfaces. The French artist Marcel Duchamp was the first to submit a work titled
“Fountain" to a 1917 exhibition, as a legitimate work of art that incited
outrage. It was dismissed as rubbish and cut from the exhibition. Nowadays, the
art-world refers to “Fountain” as a major landmark in 20th-century art, and
replicas of his porcelain (urinal) throne grace important museums around the
world. Seeing the beauty in Duchamp’s work requires thumbing one’s nose at
established ideas about art, whereas the artist has deliberately manipulated
junk to make it beautiful. There’s nothing special about these works, but in the
hands of the artist, it becomes compelling. Many people associate
environmentalism with gloom-and-doom predictions about the planet. While climate
change is a serious issue, many artists, architects and other designers are also
working on smaller scale green projects that both effect the environment and
cause change by sparking discussion and reflection. While the actual direct
impact of any given artwork or design may be small the cumulative result of
their efforts is palpable and grows bigger with each creative and sustainable
design or art project. The enVisual Dialogue series of works are an obvious
commentary on consumerism and waste, a theme that is not new, any more than is
the concept of found-object art. But Weijers, is one of a new generation of
artists, tackling the subject. We've all heard that "one man's trash is another
mans treasure". That saying takes on a new meaning when we view the world
through the eyes of the artist. The essence at the heart of the enVisual
Dialogue series can just as easily cut both ways: Is trash turned into art still
worthless? Does it become art because the artist deems it so? Duchamp would say
yes.
All objects within the 2015 enVisual Dialogue project, are made of
collected and discarded goods found in the trash. The works are beautifully
constructed with care, even if a closer look reveals its low-cost origins. Some
of the objects where once so shiny, new and easy to acquire, and yet at the same
time, so persistent and disruptive. There’s a defiant duality of form and
materials at play here. Many of the works within the enVisual
Dialogue series are intricate and almost delicate and one could review them as
a series objects expressing the suggestion to take a stand and face the reality
and responsibility in life, guiding deeper into a moral message on a more
personal and individual level and interacting on this point with the conscious
of the viewer. A mirror called self-reflection if one would want. By painting
over the objects variety of collage constructions and underlayers partly with
lucent acrylic white Weijers emphasizes the suggestive character of this
under-layer but simultaneously unveils the hollow promise which lurks behind the
pretty surface. Diversion methods as those from a stage magician or illusionist,
direct the public attention to a particular statement or point, while in the
mean time the real deal is out in the open but ignored. On the one hand, the
works within the enVisual Dialogue series are nearly all beautifully executed
and visually stimulating. On the other hand, an undercurrent of environmentalist
self-awareness undercuts subtler points the artist could add to the
conversation.
In a continuous need to disconnect from and to question the existing on the
one hand and to discover new perspectives on the other, Weijers is one of those
artists constantly questioning the techniques they use, their meanings, their
goals, all the while perfectly aware they shall never be any definite answer and
that their work is meant to remain empirical. He’s not an abstract painter using
figuration but a figurative painter who is producing abstraction.
Weijers explores the ideas of transformation and contradiction. The process
of making the work is fundamental to developing a visual language through which
he can communicate the feeling of experience to the viewer. His works define and
redefine the meanings of process and transformation. Bringing elements of chaos
and dissonance into a state of harmony, each work matures into a fully realized
presence.
During the process of making his works, Weijers re-constructs and
re-activates his materials and likens his work to that of building a
relationship: a series of attempts at intimacy with the work, of fallen
expectations, of failures and finally, of surrender. It is in the suspended
spaces between the swaying of depicted figuration and abstraction, that his
worlds take shape. His work acts as a rhythm of color, of possibility, of
realization and as a sorting structure through which the artist makes harmonies
within the chaos around him. Weijers translates his creativity and visions into
multi-layered works of art that reflect a characteristic abstract language of
signs and shapes. Within his works he reveals a deeper meaning and reflects his
view on contemporary issues. By reaching a state of liberation from existing
patterns, the interplay of lines is dominated by the metamorphosis which
conceals the evaluation of his work from the source. The spectator's fantasy is
stimulated by the intuitive and specific combination of color, material and
shape, thus seducing the spectator towards an alternative view on this
world.
