Paula. Photo by memory

Directions of modern art run at glancing speed. Eccentric carnival, thousands of costumes, masquerade of cultures, genres, styles, techniques. An invented illusion made up of new ideas, borrowed entourage, modern accessories and other ingredients. These either interacting or mutually exclusive elements replace the mythopoetic content of old European art and set aside the evils of commercial purpose. Postmodernism focused on registration and exploration of their overlapping area. Hendrik Kerstens’ choice of art from the old Dutch masters and modern portraiture.

And when Epson my constant exhibition and creative sponsor gave me the Perfection V10/V100 Photo scanner without the in-built slide module , scanning faces was much easier. This scanner is lightweight and easy to carry for long distances, and the mounting design allows for 90º and 180º opening of the cover. But the main advantage is that it can be placed vertically. After that my models were not only me and my family, but also friends, fellow photographers and acquaintances who were curious to see themselves in a new image format.

I took my first scan portraits rather spontaneously and irregularly. But as the years went by, I got deeper and deeper into the creative process. It was then that I came up with the idea of two projects, Transfiguration and Identification, which I continue to work on now. The goal of Project Transfiguration was to explore the interplay between painting and photography, or rather to realize a photographic reinterpretation of portraits created by artists of the past with photographic portraits of my contemporaries made using modern scanner techniques.

It is also an attempt to find emotional and psychological connections between people of different epochs and create new image analogies in time collation. And the “Identity” project is the transposition and artistic projection of familiar faces into new semantic, emotional, and artistic contexts. Slow shutter speeds and mostly closed eyes allowed me to focus on the inner state of my characters.

The soft “northern light” subtly sculpts the girl’s face. The detached gaze is fascinating… Hendrik Kerstens’ gallery of works – portraits of the photographer’s daughter. Dreamy or unflappable, depressed, proud or humble, strong but weak – Paula looks on from the Dutch master’s “canvases” on display. The lady wears intricate head wraps: a white polyethylene bag on her head with raised arms, which gives it the shape of an antique cap or a veil wrapped around her head like a religious veil or hair wrapped in wrapping film like a turban, or covered in netting. Contemporaneity and, at the same time, eternal beauty – this is what attracts Kerstens’ creations, and his inventiveness seems to have no limit.

Today the tendentiousness and gigantomania of artistic photography turns to topics of current interest, which deal with the acute problems of globalization and the complexity of social relations in our politically correct, but not very tolerant world. The return to the primary and most important artistic values is no longer of interest to many authors. Appeal to the past – a dialogue with the traditions of classical visual heritage, by the way, of their own country, a kind of attempt to find humanism, which has long been lost.

The novelty of the early Netherlandish painting was in the meticulous “description” of the surfaces of objects, on the one hand, and in the particular plasticity achieved by carefully spotlighted and skillfully applied light effects, on the other hand. That is why the photographer, whose main means of expression is light, so successfully “fit” into the line of old masters. Painting from a picture is a famous trick, Kerstens makes a picture from a picture, or rather, from memories of it, its “memorable cast”..

He has only one heroine that he observes throughout her life. Working on the series “Paula”, the photographer creates a mono-portrait of one person. Kerstens tries on her fake outfits as if she were putting on a children’s play for her daughter, but time is of the essence. The time of history to which the photographer refers and the time of man, the time during which he shoots Paula. The girl becomes the object and subject of an epochal and simultaneously modern context.

Modern Fusion: a psychological portrait and “artistic reconstruction” of the genre. Does the viewer have to guess the author’s remarks, look for parallels to the works of certain great Dutch? It’s not necessary. There is no direct articulation here. In fact, the prototypes of Renaissance and Baroque headdresses were the key to the “historicism.

“Modernity,” including modern art, begins, as we know, with a new attitude toward things. But it was only with a realist aesthetic that photography helped to give the ordinary, simple object the function of expressing a value formerly enjoyed only by religious objects or works of art. At the top of the fashion of old Europe were always headdresses. Paula is wearing a cone-shaped gennin from a lampshade, a cap made of aluminum foil or a napkin, a towel tied in the shape of a crucifix.

The classic form of the national cap embodied the Dutch idea of female virtue and beauty. Here Paula is wearing something resembling a luxurious ‘millstone’, the name given to a large lace collar which both men and women in Flanders were happy to wear until the eighteenth century. All these numerous interpretations – ridiculous “fakes” – are not irritating, but rather make the viewer think of the sophisticated cultural irony with which the author treats his great heritage while remaining completely serious.

Kerstens left us Paula’s real face without makeup, fashion, feminism! Her pale skin, arms, and shoulders seem to be plucked out of the darkness. It’s an alabaster mask that’s not just attached to her face, it’s absorbed it so much that it’s impossible to take it off. The same one inherited from the great Dutch. Kerstens seems to refute the popular notion that the camera never lies-his camera deceives, passing off fiction as reality and reality as fiction. But isn’t that the meaning of real art??