Artist Statement Jimmy Groen
My work arises from a constant dialogue between memory, perception, and matter. As a self-taught artist, I have developed a visual language that does not stem from academic traditions, but from a personal necessity to organize, understand, and reshape the world. I work in a variety of media — from land art and textiles to digital compositions, glass objects, and monotypes — because each material offers a different way to make tension, vulnerability, and transformation visible.
Central themes in my practice are identity, youth, violence, physics, and the fragile boundary between chaos and structure. I investigate how experiences become embedded in the body and how images can function as carriers of both trauma and recovery. My work is not a reconstruction of the past, but an attempt to find new forms for that which is difficult to put into words.
My years in the Fantastikè‑atelier in Maastricht have deepened my practice: not as a label, but as a space where autonomy and vulnerability could coexist. I am consciously located on the border between outsider traditions and professional art. This position gives me the freedom to break conventions and to combine materials and techniques in ways that are not prescribed by a discipline.
I see my work as a continuous exercise in attention. Each object, each line, and each texture is an attempt to make the invisible tangible — to show how inner worlds can manifest in form, rhythm, and material. My art invites deceleration: to look, to feel, and to allow ambiguity.