Emerging from the world of graffiti, graphic design and illustration, Jordy Van Den Nieuwendijk infiltrates the fine art sphere as a confident creative working in an unfamiliar, almost intimidating environment. Having huge respect for the tradition and legacy of classical art–especially of figurative painting, the Dutch artist feels both pressured and challenged by the prospect of entering that realm with his own work.

His latest explorations into this new territory were seen in Lasso, a recent show at Gallery Ninasagt in Düsseldorf, Germany. For years, focusing his practice on sketching and planning, Van Den Nieuwendijk now approaches each blank canvas with a fresher mind, eager to learn and discover more. In addition to technical skills such as paint manipulation, brushwork, and creation of texture, the artist also experiments with different ways of depicting a desired image or effect. In particular, his work often revolves around capturing time in a simple, almost naive, but conceptually clever way. Though still lifes at their core, his images actually convey movement around the subject by playing with perspective and scale. The broken or inconsistent lines of the "horizon" or object contours play an effective role in evoking the way long exposure photographs distort the moving elements. Revisiting the same motifs on a smaller scale, the artist is able to hone his technique and experiment with new materials and tools, even allowing visuals to expand from the surface of the canvas onto the frame around it.

At the same time, the artist worked on a smaller series of large-scale canvases currently on view alongside furniture designed by Rotganzen at Just Haasnoot, a furniture store and studio in Wassenaar, Holland. These canvases represent the artist's biggest works to date and are intentionally showcased in such setting to explore their coloration in contrast to other objects inside a real-life environment. Sasha Bogojev

Jordy Van Den Nieuwendijk Just Haasnoot Showroom 02