Venus #6
Ruud van Empel b.1958
Cibachrome print, plexiglass and aludibond, 1180 x 840 mm
edition 4 of 7
Provenance: Private Collection, USA
Venus #6 is part of a 2007 photographic series by Dutch artist Ruud van Empel. As in previous projects by the artist, Venus is a single-themed series, within which each work is titled by the name of the series and assigned a number.
Similar to previous major sequences by van Empel such as World (2005/2006), Venus features solitary figures positioned within exotic and lush natural, if hyper-real, surrounds. Unlike World however, which features boys and girls in brightly coloured clothes, all of the figures in Venus are naked young women. They are posed in classical poses reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of the goddess Venus, or are swimming languorously in calm water: Venus emerging from the sea. The standing figures, such as Venus #6, are presented in profile and full frontal poses, but with their eyes turned away from the viewer. They offer a removed, stately and statuesque beauty. The young girls in the water however, their bodies half-revealed beneath the surface, look back towards the viewer, creating a Lolita-like tension between innocence and awareness.
The fascination that van Empel’s works hold lies in such tensions. Perhaps the most apparent of these is the juxtaposition of the real and the unreal. With photographs as their base material, the foliage in works such as Venus #6 looks naturalistic, yet at the same time is obviously collaged and digitally manipulated in terms of colour and scale. The luminous colours glow behind the glass of the work and the figure posed in profile is somewhat dwarfed by the plant matter. This combination, along with the all-too-perfect composition of the work, creates a fairytale, other-worldly scene and a magical atmosphere. The unexplained presence of children in such a landscape is at once both intriguing and disquieting.
Before developing his artistic practice in the late 1980s, van Empel worked as an art director in film and television, as a graphic designer and as an interior designer. This background may have been influential in the collage technique for which the artist has become particularly known. Van Empel developed this method of working in 1996 in his first photographic series, The Office, where he used scanned objects, photographs and newspaper to collage. More recently however, as in Venus, van Empel has almost exclusively employed photographs as his source material. From a store of photographs he has taken himself, he uses the computer to digitally manipulate and collage the images. While this technique is entirely modern, van Empel clearly draws inspiration from aspects from the past. Parallels can be drawn for example between his works and those by the so-called näive realist painters such as Henri Rousseau (1844-1910).
Van Empel lives and works in Amsterdam. His work is featured in exhibitions across Europe and the United States and is held in collections such as the Groninger Museum in Groningen, the Frisia Museum in Spanbroek, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, Rabobank Nederland in Eindhoven and the Netherlands Colección Juan Redón in Barcelona, Spain.