JAN KEMPENAERS

Jan Kempenaers studied photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (Belgium) and the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (The Netherlands). He has been affiliated with the School of Arts Ghent since 2006. Since the beginning of the 90s Kempenaers has been photographing urban & natural landscapes and in 2012 he completed a PhD in the visual arts. He is currently working on a new project centered on abstract photography.

At first sight Jan Kempenaers' landscape photographs appear to be straightforwardly photographic, but the more one looks, the more they reveal themselves as conceptual rather than optical or retinal pieces. They are powerfully mute images of semi urban places. His photographs are much more than vernacular, pictorial ideograms. They speak powerfully to the post industrial condition, they speak of the technologised human subject in whatever geographical context.