Celine van den Boorn creates new versions of photographed landscapes by painting away the people, in their role as tourists, refugees and soldiers, that were originally present.

By forcing back the human presence in landscapes, she creates new images that suggest a more perfect world. At the same time her technique is generating a powerful tension between the seemingly pure nature and the still visible traces of human presence. By leaving unpainted, colourful peek through’s to the original photo, the existing contrasts in the image are amplified, creating a tension between actuality and timelessness, between reality and hope.

With this Celine wants to appeal for awareness of our biased eye, what is it really what we see? How do we navigate between reality and our wish to see what we want to see?

Dutch art critic Hans den Hartog Jager on artist book 'The Promise':

When I first saw Celine van den Boorn’s latest project, I thought back to that afternoon when it started to snow. I was about six years old and it was the Christmas holidays. A few hours earlier the skies had slowly turned a deep grey. Looking out from the window of our farm (in the distance bare pear and plum trees) I saw the first snowflakes start to fall, hesitant at first, then gaining momentum. Within an hour the trees, the barn, the gravel driveway in front of our house were covered by a thick white blanket. I found it so stunning, from behind my window, I wanted to go outside. I wanted to become a part of the perfect whiteness, of the silence, to immerse myself in nature. I quickly put on my coat, wrapped my scarf around my neck, squeezed into my boots and stepped outside – cautiously for the first few steps, but then I must have run for three or four metres, intensely enjoying the air and emptiness.

At that moment, I turned around.

What I then saw has always stayed with me. Behind me, the beautiful, impenetrable whiteness had suddenly vanished, or rather, been destroyed. The snow had been churned up into rough wedges and in between these there was now a trail of dirty black stains – from my own boots. I suddenly stopped in my tracks. As I looked around me, I immediately realised the seriousness of the situation: with each step I now took I would ruin the beauty I had so much wanted to be part of. And every new step just made it worse. It was as though nature, the snow, was shutting me out, as though snow and people couldn’t exist in the same place – in the same way as in painted photographs by Celine van den Boorn.

Only Van den Boorn took the reverse approach. Sometime towards the end of the summer of 2014, a glossy brochure fell through her letterbox with ‘Austria – holiday magazine 2014/15’ written across it in big letters. The printed matter offered exactly what you would expect from such a brochure: large, glossy photographs of stunning winter landscapes with bright blue skies and snow-dusted mountains. And of course people, fully enjoying the delights of this landscape: skiing, sledging, cross-country skiing, drinking wine or lying in each other’s arms – and there is always snow or a white mountain to be seen. For the occasion, the photographs are interspersed with philosophical quotes by well-known writers: ‘There is no right way of looking at nature. There are hundreds.’ (Kurt Tucholsky). ‘The greatest events – they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche). Sublime landscapes, as promised by the Austrian tourist board, that would transport the reader out of the grind of everyday life. Just look, all these jolly people in brightly coloured ski suits are there already. Or were you supposed to omit these people and imagine that you were standing there, in their place, and that there was no one else to be seen?

After seeing this brochure, the thought of it lingered with Van den Boorn. She had previously made different series of works in which she repeatedly applied the strategy of ‘retouching’. These were always based on existing photographs of landscapes with people: a plain in Afghanistan with soldiers, a tropical coastline with sun worshippers, a Spanish beach full of tourists – landscapes that distinctly steer the behaviour of its ‘users’. They sometimes conceal a threat and potential violence, more often they are the basis for distraction, rest and pleasure, particularly along the coastlines and beaches. However, this is difficult to discern because Van den Boorn has hidden the people behind a film of paint. She’s done this in such a way that at first you don’t see it; it’s only once you take a closer look that you slowly see them looming through the haze of paint. This is a disconcerting experience, because in this way the presence of people suddenly becomes ambiguous. To what extent do the people behind the paint matter to me as a viewer? How seriously should I take them? Or should I direct my attention towards the artist who, with her paint, has taken control over the photograph and reduced its original ‘inhabitants’ to extras within her image. That doubt is amplified by Van den Boorn’s work process. She paints with utmost precision in all of her works, with thin brushes, layer by layer, so that the original ‘models’ are only just visible, and the paint blends as much as possible into the landscape. The effect is astounding: like a kind of deus ex machina, Van den Boorn has replaced one form of cultural human presence in the landscape with another. One illusion for the other. But what is actually the difference between the two? Is one of them more authentic? More real?

And what role does Van den Boorn take herself?

Through working in this way Van den Boorn touches upon one of the great dilemmas that art has been contending with since Romanticism: the tension between mankind and nature. The works of earlier Romantic artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich were strikingly often about this tension. A famous painting such as Turner’s Slaveship, for example, depicts a sinking ship in a violent storm: the slaves (doubtless a symbol of human powerlessness) writhe in the water, they drown or are swallowed up by flesh-eating fish – there’s little doubt who holds the power here. Or take a classic like Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818): we see a man, from behind, standing on the top of a mountain looking out over a breathtaking view of mountaintops surrounded by flows of gentle mist. The man appears to have far surpassed the concerns of everyday life, as though in an eternal expanse, but at the same time he’s wearing the archetypal Spazier Kleidung and carries a walking stick by his side – he’s also ‘just’ a tourist, a temporary visitor to this landscape which has been here for centuries and is unchanged by his arrival. But he is alone and can bask in the uniqueness of his experience. You wouldn’t want to imagine another walker suddenly entering the canvas – the presence of another person would of course immediately break the illusion of unicity.

This is precisely the tension Van den Boorn evokes through her method of working. Her work suggests that we only experience nature as ‘real’ when there is no one else in our view – which is exactly why we’d rather not encounter others whilst walking through the woods or up a mountain. At the same time, she can only demonstrate this observation by applying a form of culture herself: painting, art. So, to what extent is the nature we encounter in Van den Boorn’s work in fact ‘natural’? Can a person ever erase their own tracks, or those of their peers? Moreover, does any kind of an ‘objective nature’ actually exist in photographs or paintings, in the way that such nature, by its own nature, is consistently captured by a person – and therefore, in the moment it is recorded, there must always be a person present? Van den Boorn addresses this tension by subtly and barely visibly ‘brushing away’ the people in ‘her’ photographs. By leaving them as ghostly forms, an interesting tension emerges in the image. In Romantic theory, the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ refers to the way in which we identify with objects in nature. Romantic painters avidly applied this notion by, for example, depicting a tree directly in the middle of the foreground of their canvas – a tree then acts as a kind of ‘bridge’ between the impenetrable painted landscape and the viewer. Notably, in a certain sense Van den Boorn’s method of working equally evokes that feeling. By removing the people yet leaving their traces (even when they are barely visible) as a viewer you enter an intriguing ‘landscape in between’: it’s no longer pure, distant nature, something draws you in, arouses curiosity, makes you want to enter the depicted landscape – yet it remains intangible.

The intangibility in combination with the unmistakable realisation that something here has disappeared makes Van den Boorn’s work both exciting and gratifying. Because this is of course what we would all like to do with the other people we encounter when we’re walking in the mountains, across the snow. But, as much as you might try, they will never completely disappear, there’s always a trace left behind, an idea. In this way, Van den Boorn also does something rather roguish: she subtly reminds us that we are as much ‘I’ as we are the ’other’, and more often than not we’re the latter. You can never fully withdraw yourself from humankind, not even when you are alone, as you are yourself human. That is what is so good about Van den Boorn’s Austria series: by filling completely cultured landscapes with ghosts of the ‘other’, she transforms one apparently paradise-like landscape into another. As a viewer, you can determine where you feel most at home – and if one of the two could ever become a kind of paradise for you.