into longing, vast rock

Visual artist Joan van Barneveld processes deep romantic longings within popular culture. In the absence of people a feedback of the intensity of the cultural scene is articulated through a ‘condensed’ black veil staging a longed for, introverted grandeur.

His earlier work energised the poetics of grunge culture. In recent series a deeper longing for an essential horizon is narrated with a wider visual perspective: ‘blackened’ pictures of popular spheres, devoid of people, that allow for a more reality-based motive and open up for wider narration as diptychs and triptychs. A staying at age in rock.

The oeuvre is represented together with insightful texts by LA critic Jan Tumlir, Dutch philosopher Rene Gabriels and Onomatopee director Freek Lomme who address aspects of landscape, rock’s intensity and romanticism in pop, leaving a sourcebook, a bible, for the identification of longing.