Dutch artist Nemo Jantzen has established himself over the last 20 years working as an contemporary artist best known for his Pop Art, installations, and hyperrealistic paintings. His artwork is established in most leading art markets and galleries in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Singapore among others. His work be found in renowned art collections both public institutions and private.

Born and raised in The Hague, after his study of art, design and photography at the RTO in Rotterdam he moved to Antwerp, working as a Creative Director and billboard artist while further developing his technique and style as a fine artist. After several years in Belgium, and a year traveling through Asia and the Middle East, he settled down in Spain, dedicating his career to the making and the promoting fine art, mentoring other emerging artists, and consistently exploring new mediums and new avenues to bring the artwork to light.

His work has consistently explored the dialogue of narrative tropes in an image soaked contemporary environment. Early works found pop-inspired imagery creating new contexts from photo-journalism and advertising, with highly detailed enlarged objects placed out of their natural environment.

Successive shows moved on to use and explore cinematic stills as the source of a visual collective consciousness. ‘Hyper-realistic’ work takes the dialogue to the next level by incorporating the vocabulary of cinematography and the expediency of digital photography as an inspiration for the new paintings. Nemo’s hyper-realist narrative paintings and his mixed media work evoke the iconic images embedded in the collective unconscious, illustrating the overlap between our memories of images from contemporary cinema and our real-world experiences.

In the latest series, Inspired by media, pop culture, and film Jantzen takes Neo-pointillism to the next level utilizing thousands collection of photography, cinematographic stills, and other collected material encapsulated in glass spheres; hiding and revealing a subject filtered idealized world through the eye of the beholder and depicting the banality of our society and trends in symbolic evocation of a contemporary human journey. The artist is not interested in fragmentation of objects in the real world; he is interested in disclosing the unity underlying “reality”.

I’m trying to capture and cope with those voyeuristic times when surveillance cameras are now accepted in our society; and in the name of media-driven security and control, this imagery has turned into entertainment.

(Nemo Jantzen)

I do not just tell a single story neither portray a world of according to the voyeur. With large-scale images built from hundreds of small images, each story is encapsulated in spheres of glass, my work keeps reminding to viewers: ‘The more you look, the less you see.

(Nemo Jantzen)