The world of Merel Jansen (°1990, NL) smells of turpentine and oil paint. She is filled with color, form, and movement.
In her early years, Merel found stability in portraiture and realism: a way to understand the world through the faces and stories of others. But she soon discovered that the power of her painting did not lie in mimicking what she saw, but in showing what she felt. Sadness, anger, wonder, and vulnerability become not themes for her, but colors — a unique language of energy and emotion. What is heavy in life becomes something that lives and moves on the canvas.
For Merel, color is more than a medium: it is reality itself. In her synesthetic experience, numbers, people, and memories all carry their own color. These colors meet each other — sometimes in collision, sometimes in harmony. A form determines what a color can be; a color reveals what a form means. Thus, a painting emerges that does not depict a world, but creates a new one: a space full of intensity and resonance.
Merel refuses to limit herself to one style. Abstract and figurative paintings stand side by side, as two ways to show the same existence — the outer and the inner, the mask and the heart. The viewer is invited to move between these worlds and thus create their own meaning.
In a time when truth often fades into opinion or pose, Merel seeks what is real: the directness of feeling, the intensity of color, the freedom of gesture.
Her paintings do not aim to explain, but to invite. They ask us to pause, to look, and to discover what authenticity means for each of us.
Welcome to the opening on Friday, 28/11/2025 at 6 PM. The exhibition runs until Sunday, 11/01/2026.
