Visual artist Jurgen Rooijackers Follow.Art Card

About me

Landscapes are not objective realities—they only come into being in human perception. Without the gaze that assigns meaning, there is only indifferent, unstructured nature. What we experience as landscape is a construction: a subjective interpretation of what we see, shaped by our need for order and beauty.

Most landscape art reinforces this illusion by imposing emotions and aesthetics on nature. However, this projection only reveals our own limitations—the urge to tame the incomprehensible, to translate chaos into something manageable.

My work breaks through that projection. I use photography not to capture nature as it is, but to expose how we experience it: fragmented, contradictory, and often uncomfortable. By manipulating images, I do not create romantic representations, but a total experience that rubs. I deliberately place depth, sharpness and composition in illogical places, not to suggest harmony, but to destabilise the viewer. The results are not landscapes to escape into, but to run into: raw, relentless, and unruly.

It is not about beauty. It is about the discomfort that arises when the viewer realises that what he sees is not truth, but a construction—just like the landscape itself.

Photography could be a neutral record, were it not for the fact that every capture is already an interpretation. I do not use the camera to represent nature “objectively”, but to expose the lie of objectivity. By fragmenting, rearranging and manipulating images using various techniques, I show both the rawness of nature and the fragility of our perception. What remains is not a landscape to escape to, but a confrontation: nature is not beautiful, not understandable, and certainly not malleable. The viewer experiences not harmony, but the friction between what he sees and what he thinks he sees.

It is not a correction of reality. It is an unmasking of the illusion that we could ever capture that reality.