Jan Dibbets

With his early ‘perspective corrections’ Dibbets demonstrated that space, on the image surface, is an optical illusion and that photography also provides, in that sense, a distorted image of reality. In a contemporary manner he continues a tradition that goes back to the seventeenth-century painter Saenredam. Jan Dibbets is not interested, however, in mathematical perspective studies, but in the creation of a new and independent image. This becomes clearly evident with these ‘four windows’. Due to the vantage point of the camera and the perspectival distortion, the shapes of the windows change. Dibbets has adhered the photographs, as separate geometric shapes, to the painted background. Because of this, the windows seem to tilt within the image surface. The light from outdoors is captured in the photographic cut-out and embedded in the color scheme of the painting. The  suggested movement of the image, the opposition between depth and surface, transparency and color lend both complexity and simplicity to these works.