FONTANA AMSTERDAM

'Hogevaart en de bekoring van het kleine'

Thijs Segers

Galerie Fontana would like to welcome you to the opening of the solo exhibition 'Hogevaart en de bekoring van het kleine' featuring new paintings by Thijs Segers.

Central themes in the paintings of Thijs Segers are the beauty and mystery of decay and transience, in combination with the search for something everlasting, the search for a home. Thijs Segers: 'My work is an intimate embrace with transience. I envelop subjects close to myself like my dog Butske or abandoned scenes in and around my home in a wistful cloak, without suffocating them with my fear for the world. Drawing mostly on nature, I try to look for a way to accept decay. The paintings exist just before the lightest light and the darkest dark, at the in-between-place of earth and the world of thought.'

'The apparent randomness in the paintings of Thijs Segers is reminiscent of sedimentation in a river. Small stones or sand are constantly on the move, until the flow of the river subsides and they settle on the bottom, where they become part of the local landscape.

Many key elements in Segers' work have also once rolled into his life in a similar way. For instance, he inherited the pigments he paints with from a painter whose house he lived in after his passing. Wanting to find a way to use those pigments, he started making his own tempera paint, the medium Segers now works with almost exclusively. He started making tempera during a residency at the former studio of the late Leon Adriaans, an artist with whom Segers has maintained a one-sided friendship since his stay.

This miniscule distance between Thijs Segers' living environment, the subjects in the paintings and the way they are painted, are the focal point of his art. The paintings are the thin skin that forms when milk is boiled, a tiny membrane that must exist because the difference in heat is too great. The egg tempera also behaves in a similar way, many thin transparent layers of paint create over- and underexposed scenes in which rooms, (domestic) animals and the landscape around him are given eternal life.

The speed at which the outside world seeps into the paintings is considered with great care; it often takes Segers quite a while to paint any part of his life. Only when he is afraid of losing something does he reach for his brushes.'

Tobias Thaens

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Thijs Segers (NL 1996) graduated in Fine Art (BA) painting from AKI ArtEZ academy for art & design, Enschede (2020). His work has been exhibited throughout the Netherlands, including at the Noordbrabants Museum, the Vincent van Goghhuis and Museum Villa Mondriaan. In 2020 he received the HeArtfund-stipend and in 2025 he is financially supported by the Mondriaan Fund. In 2021, 2024 and 2025 he was nominated for the Royal award for modern Painting.

CATALOGUE
A small catalogue containing the paintings from the exhibition and written contributions by Kars Persoon and Tobias Thaens will be presented at the opening and will be available at the gallery during the course of the exhibition.

Thursday 22 May - Saturday 28 June 2025

For an overview of the available works click HERE

FONTANA AMSTERDAM

OPENING HOURS

Wednesday - Saturday
13.00 - 18.00

For an appointment outside opening hours:

+31 (0)20 22 3 88 33

info@galeriefontana.com

FONTANA BRUSSELS

Les Ruines de Paris

Solo Exhibition Marchand & Meffre

What if, suddenly, Paris—the City of Light—were to go dark, erased from the map, emptied of its inhabitants, like the deserted megapolis of a fallen empire? Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, photographers of modern decrepitude, transpose this unsettling reality into our own. Galerie Fontana, having exhibited the artists’ series in its entirety – beginning with the “Ruins of Detriot” (2005 - 2010), presents the latest continuation, “Les Ruines de Paris.” The artists wander through the now-deserted streets of the French capital, subverting the iconography that defines its image. In doing so, they revisit the hypothesis proposed by American essayist Alan Weisman in The World Without Us (2007), which explores the consequences—particularly for infrastructure—of humanity’s suddendisappearance from the planet Earth. Ruins are objects of fascination and projection, an aesthetic and critical focal point. The human mind instinctively unfolds itself around them, much like plants root and grow over old stones. In this way, the motif traverses history in its ability to link past, present and possible future.

A pictorial exploration of ruins seemed logical—it seemed so obvious that they approached it with caution. The apocalyptic imagination in AI is, after all, a recurring theme, almost a stylistic exercise. One January afternoon in 2024, the artists launched their first four iterations as an experiment. The images loaded on the screen, and despite a somewhat rough result, seeing the 'physical,' tangible reality of the organic decay spreading through the streets of Paris, and feeling the sense of abandonment in a setting that was not exotic to them, was truly unsettling— though we thought we had anticipated the feeling. There is always a gap between imagining, designing, and seeing concretely.

The terrifyingly powerful AI tool of synthesis and imitation enables the duo to delve into the twilight imagination whilst reflecting on the role of photography as an optical device. To bring this project to life, they generated over 52,000 images, averaging 650 attempts per finalised image. In this collision of fiction and reality shaped by anxiety, the navigation between historical and personal references allows the photographers to delineate ruinism. They raise a pressing question: With human ingenuity challenged by the overwhelming rise of its own creation, is it now our material and physical human space that risks collapse? Are we witnessing our own obsolescence?

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Parisian-born Yves Marchand (b. 1981) and Romain Meffre (b. 1987) continue to live and work in the city. Their working relationship began between 2002 and 2005 after discovering a shared interest in photography and its potential to illustrate the rise and fall of our societies. Independently taught, the duo has been exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; Polka Galerie, Paris; MUDO Musée de l'Oise, Beauvais; Tristan Hoare Gallery, London; Maison des Arts, Antony; Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster, Gent; MUCEM, Marseille; Witley Court, Great Witley; Museo Nazionale Romano, Roma; and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco to name a few. Their work can be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Deutsches Filminstitut, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, Fondation Carmignac, The Ford Foundation, and Fondation d'entreprise Hermès. Marchand and Meffre have been the recipients of prizes such as the Prix des Libraires in the category of J' aime le livre d' art for “Les Ruines de Paris” (2024) and the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis for “The Ruins of Detroit” (2012).