Mathijs Hunfeld

About

Artist Statement:

Mathijs Hunfeld interrogates the superficial layers of pop culture, where he utilizes an interdisciplinary practice to engage with themes of fantasy and desire. Through a conceptual approach, his work offers a critical and satirical reflection to showcase the glory and reveal its downfall.

By placing his practice at the crossroads of fine arts and consumer goods, a self-reflective viewpoint plays a pivotal role in situation work between the object and the subject. The often differently branded bodies of work situate the artist on the sidelines while revealing personal experiences surrounding themes of addiction and loneliness that are consequently pulled towards a larger but relational narrative of the viewer.

Through contextual and interdisciplinary explorations, Hunfeld’s work moves towards forms of sampling that recontextualize, alter, and curate mainstream objects into new and critically assessed modes of being. This focus on the intersection between consumer and product elaborates on how individuals extend beyond their boundaries by being re-imagined through their inventions. The work satirically celebrates its closely related emotional dependencies by drawing visual and material inspiration from presentational and promotional occurrences within pop cultures that further establish themselves in media, such as musical lyrics, advertisements, fashion collections and store designs. These dependencies are sourced and strengthened by the general public’s interests, contemporary communication, and collective fantasies. Hunfeld’s perspective deviates due to disagreement and possibly feared aspirations.

His interdisciplinary approach creates representations that stand at a safe distance from their actuality. This worldbuilding practice attempts to create visual and material languages out of notions like the flattening of distinctions, the immediacy within late capitalism, and the disorientated subject. As these concepts are often out of reach, the sampling process pushes the work into various media that closely relate to their pop-cultural framework, materializing an emotional promise through industrial and polished production standards within art making. Therefore, the concept decides on its medium, curating the viewer’s perspective into space by appropriating advertisement techniques, liminal spaces and accessorizing various identity extensions, ultimately using a participatory horizontal and passive vertical plane.

The work doesn’t try to thrive on pop culture’s existing visual language aesthetically but creates various representational, participatory, and conceptual ways to enter its critical narrative.

Current practice:

This body of work revolves around the critical branding process of TADA. TADA creates body accessories and borders in public space through the ideology of contemporary consumption. The relationship of these two disciplines is closely related to the subject’s exchange between entertainment and appropriation of mainstream content and functions as a mirror back to its user.

The brand name refers to the infant’s missing vocabulary and the exclaim of a reveal, satirically making a combination that focuses on the non-constructive pursuit of self-promotion. The accessories and scenography of TADA show the absent user through work that is pushed to a physical and conceptual point of collapse. The brand exists on the intersection between subject and object, drawing a self-sabotaging character rooted in the pursuit of pleasure.

The accessories appropriate hedonistic products and transform them into degrading self-promotion, satirically confronting its user by reflecting their need for pleasure and providing temporary satisfaction. The notion of deconstruction and the grotesque emphasizes the traditional association of the miniature with balance and containment, presenting a world of perfect proportion. By upscaling this world to the gigantic, the collection reveals chaos and disproportion, aiming at the fetishization of childhood as a pure and uncorrupted state of innocence and further digging down into the adult’s relating fear, desire, and aggression, showing how concretely this paradise is lost. Complementary the work is the interplay between cute and aggression, laid bare by vulnerability and helplessness, presenting a power imbalance between object and user.

Concerning TADA, the visual language of toys has close ties to consumer culture by being based on images and simplifications of reality. In this context, it represents the confrontation of the growing gap between sign- and use-value through contradicting materials and proportions. The curated experience of using these ‘luxury items’ points to the inability to sustain their fantasy, referring to the unconstructive self-promotion of TADA and emphasizing the life cycle of desire and lack.

The scenography projects focus on creating borders in public spaces that represent our indulgent relationship with the life cycle of content. It elaborates on how a constant flow of content on vertical surfaces creates hyperreal representations of space, removing any natural horizon. It positions the subject at a distance that promises no community or progression but a shifting formation. Being imbued in its disappearance, the work proposes how the capitalist system produces excessive identities and, in turn, consumes them rapidly. The image only holds value because it is part of a sequence but gains no grounding. Effects like pixelation and reflection foster a sense of detachment, positioning the visuals as propositions while the viewer remains a full-time participant within this construct. These liminal spaces, combined with limiting but guiding attributes, show the relationship to the flow of content, giving the illusion of progress without gaining a new determination. Translating a passive viewer into space, the work creates a distance between the viewer and the work.