Ruud van Empel
Lauren Scott explores the artist’s latest exhibition, where nothing is as it seems
The images (or perhaps we should call them works) of Dutch visual artist Ruud van Empel are instantly recognisable, and like no other photographer. We say this, but then the photographer himself tells us he chose photography because “it does not have a recognisable style of its own. Drawing or painting do, but for me, photography is neutral. I like that.”
Where realist painters might strive to create a photographic quality with their brush, Ruud turns this notion on its head, creating a sort of photoartificialism with his camera. You’re more likely to take Ruud’s photographs for paintings at a glance.
Ruud van Empel is one of the more innovative and influential contemporary photographers working today. He has just exhibited for the third time in Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London (which represents him in the UK); following this, we were inspired to find out more about the creative methods he uses. The images featured here are from Ruud’s two latest series, Floresta Negra and Voyage Pittoresque, both of which were shown in the UK gallery for the first time. Voyage Pittoresque shows worlds of photo collage, where looming flowers and oversized leaves become the focus of the frame, whereas Floresta
Negra depicts nocturnal forest scenes, eerily backlit by starlight or bioluminescence.
Ruud wanted to ponder the themes of beauty and the pastoral through his trademark use of composites. “The presentation at HuxleyParlour Gallery is a selection of works that are also in my latest exhibition at Museum Belvedere in the Netherlands,” he explains. MakingNature (the name of the overseas exhibition) consists of around 30 images that all explore the same theme. “No people can be found in these bodies of work, no portraits... Only the nature that I explore and display in my way and outlook.” Sometimes Ruud’s outlook is organised, light and beautiful, sometimes chaotic, alluring, appealing, then swerving to dark and threatening. “In the last room, the Belvedere exhibition shows the course to abstraction, a total of five new series of work that were made between 2015 and 2018.”
Ruud lives and work in Amsterdam, and as we talk to him he vaguely tells us that he’s experimenting, “trying out new things I have not done before”. He began his studies at an art academy in the Netherlands, but “chose photography because of the possibilities that came with computers and their software”. Ruud uses Photoshop to utterly transform reality and nature to his own vision. For these pieces, he scoured his vast library of digital fabrics and foliage, leaves and plants to create dream-like photographic collages – utopias, but where nothing is exactly as it seems.
Ruud also travelled to jungles and gardens around the world to take fragments for these works. “I have taken photographs in many countries including Sri Lanka, Cuba, Surinam, Italy, Switzerland, South Africa and the Netherlands. All my images are fully assembled, and there are around 250 photos in every image,” he says.
Each of the images is a collage, the result of a painstaking combination of hundreds of fragments taken from Ruud’s own photo database. A single work can take him up to three months to complete, and the images are often uncanny and unsettling, because of this complex method of digital collage. His work makes us question what’s real and what’s artificial, in an age where digital simulation is generally all around us.
Unlike wildlife photographers or naturalists, Ruud isn’t trying to
depict an idealised vision of nature. “Nature is paradisiacal, you could say, but it is in fact a jungle. It’s a whole world in itself in which all these creatures live and move around and eat each other up. It is one big struggle, one big fight really. And that’s Paradise.”
Ruud uses Photoshop extensively to create his pieces. “I started working in Photoshop in about 1994,” he says. “I experimented intensively with [it] until 2000, first working from scans and later from the photos I made myself. First, I built offices [in the series
The Office, from 1996], which were like film sets; then I started to build human figures out of hundreds of small fragments of photos [ Study for Women, 1998-1999]; and then I focused on creating natural landscapes and forest scenes [ Study in Green, 2003]. My technique originated during this period – the miniature construction of an image from many small pieces.”
We’ve mentioned Ruud’s method of digital collage many times now, but how does the process actually work? “First
I might photograph models [or still-life objects] in my studio.” Despite producing such detailed and complex final images, Ruud works with just one camera, one lens and no tripod. In the case of portraits, he will mix parts of each model so that a new, nonexistent person arises.
“I do not use morphing techniques but do everything manually. I cut and paste digitally. I then take many photographs of different environments, such as leaves, water, trees or sometimes interiors. I photograph everything separately: loose leaves, petals and branches, and also just walls or windows, doors, cupboards.”
“N ature is paradisiacal, you could say, but it is in fact a jungle... It is one big struggle, one big fight”
All of the photos Ruud shoots go into his database, and from there he can choose the photos he wants to work with.
“I have built a database since 1997. When I started photographing digitally in 2002, it grew enormously, and it now contains more than 100,000 photos.”
As you’d expect, the transition to the digital age has transformed Ruud’s workflow. “It has undergone enormous development,” he says. “Digital photography works much better for me than analogue work. My database has grown through it, and everything goes much faster now. Technically it has become more and more complicated than in the beginning, and since I started to make bigger pictures.”
Throughout his career, Ruud’s imagery has embraced a range of historical references, including Dutch Old Masters and early photomontage artists. He describes his visual style as “similar to painting, which is really my great inspiration”. Ruud’s working methods blend the techniques of painting, photography and collage together, encouraging the viewer to confront the value of truth in photography, but also their own ideas about what’s real (and what isn’t) in a picture.
“[My work] looks like a painting, but it is a photograph, a montage,” he says. “Everything was placed where I wanted it. My idea was to construct a photograph that would look like an ordinary photo, but where everything was actually made up.”
“My idea was to construct a photograph that would look ordinary... but where everything was made up”
See more of Ruud van Empel’s work at huxleyparlour.com/artists/ruud-van-empel