Florentijn Edelgonda de Boer

Exploring ideas on motherhood, artistry, dependency and the role of the physical in it all, Florentijn de Boer (1993) shares a range of personal stories in different shapes and sizes, often in connection to the natural world around us. Through her practice, she searches to express intuition while at the same time navigating the countless possible ways to juggle the practical lemons of life. How do we deal with inner conflict? How do we make lemonade from all these lemons? Acts of sketching and collaging offer Florentijn a moment of quiet in the lemon storm, providing space for processing, reflection, but also emotions and daydreaming. We see a face on the moon, a car in the clouds, a dark omen in a swarm of bees; shapes show us what we want to see in them. They mirror a world of emotions that is in constant movement, existing behind the humdrum of daily life. In this way, Florentijn’s heavy cotton canvases and their brightly pigmented oil pastel compositions likewise function as mirrors. They show portraits and stories in shapes inspired by a fantastical world of flora and fauna. Combined with her use of color, the artist captures metaphors and symbolism in her canvases while still maintaining the viewer’s freedom to freely associate. The work’s graphic approach makes for flattened shapes with which a hierarchy between them is nowhere to be found: foreground and background equally exist within one image or frame. Though these paintings are two dimensional, they carry a tangible dynamic, a playful vibration between depth and space. Much like clouds, trees, flowers and bodies, their colors and shapes stand up straight, bend their head down, collapse, crumble and decay. They dance, stand still, melt together and dissolve. They cause a physical experience, in which the emotional world is reflected and guides.