Duo exhibition: Ramon Otting & Samuel Dejong

For the Dutch painter Ramon Otting, the landscape is an enormous source of inspiration. The landscape reflects our state of mind, is pleasant, can heal or gives rise to contemplation. His work is all about nature and what it does to us humans. This interaction is essential.

In many of his landscapes, an almost physical threat is present. Sometimes in dark and stormy skies, sometimes in overwhelming lightness. The superior power of nature compared to man, which will always lose, is palpable. The work focuses more and more on building up the wholeness that can be found in nature. From low vantage points and using terroir and soil from where he finds inspiration, Otting shows us the beauty and richness of form and color in nature. The looseness of his painting combined with his sculptures opens up his work even more, enhancing the power in the details.

For many years, Samuel Dejong has been making the beauty of extremely useful animals visible to the general public. As a self-taught artist with a medical background in surgery, bioengineering and design, he pushes the boundaries of both technical and aesthetic potential, applying surgeon’s precision to the visual arts. One of the recurring subjects in Dejong’s oeuvre is the small creatures that sometimes make us wonder at the beauty of nature, while at other times they can arouse disgust and even fear in many of us. With his art, Samuel Dejong challenges us to witness the beauty of the foundation of our ecosystem: insects. No other creature is so elegant and vulnerable, yet so strong and indestructible.