Handiedan

"The original collage artwork on vintage porcelain ‘Bollywood Sugar in Blue’ was part of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s ‘Ephemeral’ group show at Modern Eden in San Francisco in September 2018.

The art of Dutch artist Handiedan involves a complex cut and paste mixture of digital and highly detailed sculptural hand cut collages.

Deeply influenced by scientific and spiritual interests Handiedan’s art embraces the various forms of vital energy endlessly permeating the universe and mirrors the eternal motion of life in its kaleidoscopic manifestations.

Protagonists of the works are the iconic pin-ups clearly inspired by the burlesque universe. The artist digitally composes their bodies by assembling anatomical parts of different pre-existing pin-up images from the 1920-1940s, transforming them into images reminiscent of the Neo-Classical and Victorian ages, the Parisian Belle Époque, up to the 1940's and Post-War sexy imagery.

The iconic female figures stand for the Lover and the Mother, embodying sexual freeing and tender love, strength and vulnerability. At once mistresses and goddesses, these creatures are endowed with a symbolic power that can be traced down to the archetype of Mother Earth (or Mother Nature) in which all ancient cultures identified the natural course of the circle of life with its transitory stages of birth, change, decay and renewal.

The ornamental background of the image is digitally pulled out of paper currency, vintage stock options, sheet music, science maps and her own drawings. A visual world filled with Fibonacci spirals, fractal patterns, planetary charts and sacred geometry, all scientifically or symbolically representing the universal harmony ruling nature and life.

The creative process shifts into a more meditative slow-paced stage as Handiedan assembles the printed layers of paper and found collage material with refined craftsmanship. Each detail is printed on multiple sheets of paper that are masterfully hand-cut and carefully pasted over to reach a sculpted quality. As a result, Handiedan’s art carries an organic unity and the visual motifs harmonically coexist into a single yet richly complex experience that instantly strikes for its exuberant liveliness while the countless details scattered all over ask for the gaze to slowly wander and linger around it.

Handiedan’s art can both be seen in galleries throughout the world as well outside the gallery as large scale wheat paste installations.