About Koen de Vries
With my self-developed sketchy modeling style I make portrait busts for the 21st century. The human facial expression is one of the most direct and basic forms of communication. Everyone “understands” it. This offers the face an inexhaustible source of inspiration for theater makers and portraitists.
About my work
I use the communication form of the human facial expression, with a contemporary and unique design language, to ask contemporary questions about being human.
But mind you; the poetry on which I tell the story has my focus. It is the flashes of detail floating on a blur of matter from which the brain draws a series of associations (but which are not necessarily the same at each encounter with the image).
Portraiture has changed under the influence of the emergence of film. Until then, portraits were static, like the immortalization of a notable client. Film fragments brought a new, intimate look at the range of human expressions. I like to compare my images with a film still, the core of a scene. And because the viewer moves around the image, he brings that ‘trapped’ time to life.
At the same time when film provided a more intimate view of people, the psychological image of man also tilted. Darwin came up with his theory of evolution, but the idea of the makeable man also made its appearance, with his 15 ‘minutes of fame’. In my work I follow this journey of discovery. But I look beyond those famous 15 minutes and look for the time left, without fame, the remaining 1425 minutes of the day.
Eternally Koen