For Now it’s day, but I am dreaming, I freely used negatives from holiday pictures and slides from my parents’ collection. The basis for this work is thus built on personal memories and experiences I had as a young boy. They are fragmented impressions of travels, often to the south of Europe. Assumably these images will also evoke in the viewer echoes from the past. Discoloured holiday snaps and old family albums covered in dust. This effect is intensified by combining my own images with snippets from nostalgic postcards. For my collages, I often choose to work with analogue techniques and develop my images in the darkroom. I like to work with materials such as handmade Japanese papers and weathered/yellowed papers I find in vintage stocks. In this way, I breathe new life into traditional techniques and old materials. Now it’s day, but I am dreaming shows new surreal landscapes balancing between blurred visions and feverish hallucinations. I often play with the horizon. Occasionally by roughly tearing the photographic paper or exactly the opposite by marking or cutting it in a sharp line. And so mountains fuse with oceans, forests with ice floes. Graceful bodies merge with sturdy but equally delicate landscapes. It is nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. Happy but perhaps also a bit sad.

‍

About

Melancholy, fragility or darkness. Duality is probably key in this body of work. Motmans balances between figurative and abstract, complexity and a – deceitful – simplicity. The graduate from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, fashion designer and visual artist puts his identity, personality, personal experiences and dreams first in his collages. This intimate work appeals to universal values and feelings, despite its highly personal nature. Landscapes and male figures are recurring themes. Not surprisingly as during his childhood Gert struggled with his sexuality and found protection and security in nature where seclusion and daydreaming allowed him to escape from reality. Motmans’ pictures express a desire for another world. A longing for familiarity and nostalgia. At the same time his images seem to embrace a threatening, futuristic vision. As if Marcel Proust glances at Henry David Thoreau while a young Brian Eno watches cheerfully and provides the scene with soft rustling sounds.