Exhibition ‘Chained / Unchained’
This month the exhibition ‘Chained / Unchained’ by self-taught illustrator and cartoonist Pepijn Schermer can be seen in the Passage. Imaginative worlds have inspired Pepijn’s work ever since his youth. He believes that dreams can be a great source of inspiration, if you train yourself to remember them. Narrative elements, with influences from Renaissance art, surrealism and comics, entered his perception at a later age and coherent worlds emerged in his head and on paper. The use of color in his work is mainly inspired by his travels through Latin America.
Pepijn’s mixed media series ‘Chained / Unchained’ came about after a burnout followed by an depression. At the time, he had difficulty accommodating his feelings, so he vented his emotions on the canvas.
“At that time there was a certain image stuck in my head. I saw myself floating in a black stream, with a burning earth as the only source of light. In the end I translated this image into a painting.”
In every part of the ‘Chained’ series, Pepijn has incorporated a negative emotion of trauma. Slowly it became clear to him that the paintings all had a sense of imprisonment in common. A captivity due to the spasmodic clinging to a certain emotion. In order not to continue to wallow in this depression, he has made a ‘reflection’ of each painting, where ‘holding on’ gave way to ‘letting go’. And so the series ‘Unchained’ was born (The numbering of each image from both series corresponds to each other’s counterpart).
In order to connect both series, with diverse landscapes, creatures and use of color, Pepijn made the work ‘Flight of the Phoenicians’.
With his work, Pepijn hopes to offer people who deal with certain simular issues of depression comfort and recognition. More information about Pepijn’s work can be found on his website.
The exhibition can be seen until April 25th.
The price per painting is € 500, with the exception of ‘Flight of the Phoenicians’, which is for sale for € 800.