Jelle van den Heede
The search for beauty and simplicity offers a personal way out of the chaos of reality and the inner chaos. A chaos is universal and characteristic of life/ of being human.
– Jelle van den Heede
The images of Jelle Van Den Heede (°1978) are like tactile dreams. She creates a poetic world where only feeling counts and everything else disappears. Her work is minimalistic and fragile. It invites the viewer to come closer and discover her world. In that world her gaze often rests on the details. The beauty in details is often overlooked. Her images radiate simplicity, tranquility and wonder, but for the attentive viewer these images also bear witness to a certain layering. These layers are hidden in a feeling which accompanies an image or a title that gives something away.
In her study Graphic Design / Illustration, Jelle developed her sense of balance and composition. Later she followed a Free Graphics course in which she further refined her drawing style as an illustrator. In her free work she increasingly shifted the focus from the figurative to the more abstract. This translated into pure lines, color, shapes and rhythm. Three years ago she evolved in the direction of the collage technique and recently also photography. Both techniques form a way of working in which she seamlessly connects the figurative with the abstract.
In essence, Jelle is looking for the same thing within every technique; the perfectly balanced image that is striking in its simplicity. She sees herself as an ‘image collector’. Someone who collects fragments of images, dissects them and composes them into a new image. It is an intuitive way of working in which she tries to translate an underlying feeling into an image that reveals itself just enough.
Two themes are very present in her work. Human nature and the surrounding nature. Both are unmistakably linked. In her work these themes and the tension between them regularly overlap. By omitting everything superfluous, by reducing it to its essence, Jelle tries to understand reality. As a result, her work often balances on the border of the figurative and the abstract.
Her images are extremely personal solutions. The search for beauty and simplicity offers a personal way out of the chaos of reality and the inner chaos. A chaos is universal and characteristic of life/ of being human. By making and displaying these images, Jelle hopes that these images touch and refer to other realities and will also offer ways out of the chaos. Jelle therefore likes to leave the precise interpretation of the meaning of an image to the viewer.