Jens
Hesse

I was born in Hessen, Germany. Since 2006 I am living & working in Antwerp, Belgium.

I started my education with an apprenticeship as a tailor and studied from 1996-2001 fashion design at the Hannover university for art, design & media. Afterwards I worked for many years for several brands like Wrangler, Esprit & C&A, most times with a focus on Denim products.

In 2009 I started intensively with painting (although it was always a passion for me) and since then I spend every free minute on this medium.

Initially I was inspired by malfunctions on television and I was delighted with the mix of realism and abstraction that I saw. I started to use this appearance as a reference for my paintings. 

At the same time I was experimenting with paintings on different structures to give my works a new approach, and my first paintings on corduroy showed exactly the character of these television pics: the vertical stripes that gives a fluttering effect, like the painting is still moving. So I combined my new technique and the visual impact of the interferences. 

But there was also a deeper meaning in it: How does the world work in today’s time, where everything is influenced by technology? What is real and what is not? What happens behind the screen, in this world full of clutter and noise? By painting these malfunctions I want to create an area of conflict of the digital world and the traditional medium of painting.

My first paintings were based on given images that I took from interfered satellite-TV. It was a realistic reproduction of our media-saturated world, but also revealing its insufficiency, showing its not real. Later on the objects itself became more important to me. I was engaged with provoking similar interferences on objects that I chose on my own.

www.jenshesse.com