honorable mention
Thoelen Steven belgium
Photo © Thoelen Steven
title
RANDom FOMO, Delusion of a Dreamer.
'Typical is boring' is a statement I always presented to myself as a personal advice. And this statement runs like a thread through my life, whereby uplifting enthusiasm dominates the exercise of my passion. I'm a self-taught man, a photographer who's addicted to that shot of adrenaline you get as soon as you leave a well-trodden path. The world is a playing field... let the demons out to play. Steven Thoelen (1978 - Belgium) is best known for his fine art photography that portrays a fantasy experience through an eclectic chain in wonder. He's a scenarist, decorator, director, musician and fine-art photographer. His elaborate compositions consist of emotional shots that depict the heat of the moment in a narrative story. Be prepared for atypical storytelling with people and objects being portrayed in complicated fantasy scenes. One by one compositions intertwined with an overload of details and symbolism. They are artworks that unfailingly add moments of drama to interiors, an ingredient that he regards as vital. I do not have the ambition to teach spectators what to think, I do strive to show that people sometimes look at the facts in a different way. In art and by extension in life, it comes down to finding the balance. Perfect is good, but good is better. Through my artwork, it feels like I'm losing my way in the right direction. Do you understand?
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entry description
RANDOM FOMO, my own surreal fine-art photography series, all shot in Belgium (2019/2020). Surrealistic scenes, all part of my own crime story around a fictional character, Mr. De Maizière. A London based dark lawyer surrounded by a sinister company of lipstick junkies and rogue figures. I made the whole tangible in a serie of 'tableau vivants', five meter prints in Diasec. Each photo is reminiscent of a still from a feature film and is a static fragment from a crime scene in the life of Mr. De Maizière. At the end of 2020 I brought in with a new recording from the same story. In this artwork, 67-years-old Indian Mr. Singh Multani poses as a director of an orphanage, surrounded by fourteen children and... De Maizière when he was still a boy of nine years old! But the protagonist does not end well. I placed him as a suburban clochard on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I personally exchanged a number of illusions for life experience and I increasingly regard my art project RANDOM FOMO as a nod to myself. All people on my artworks are friends, together they form the greatest denominator of myself, each with their shortcomings and idiosyncrasies. Because, in the end, Life is the sum of all choices...about the photographer
I live my life with my soul in my hand.'Typical is boring' is a statement I always presented to myself as a personal advice. And this statement runs like a thread through my life, whereby uplifting enthusiasm dominates the exercise of my passion. I'm a self-taught man, a photographer who's addicted to that shot of adrenaline you get as soon as you leave a well-trodden path. The world is a playing field... let the demons out to play. Steven Thoelen (1978 - Belgium) is best known for his fine art photography that portrays a fantasy experience through an eclectic chain in wonder. He's a scenarist, decorator, director, musician and fine-art photographer. His elaborate compositions consist of emotional shots that depict the heat of the moment in a narrative story. Be prepared for atypical storytelling with people and objects being portrayed in complicated fantasy scenes. One by one compositions intertwined with an overload of details and symbolism. They are artworks that unfailingly add moments of drama to interiors, an ingredient that he regards as vital. I do not have the ambition to teach spectators what to think, I do strive to show that people sometimes look at the facts in a different way. In art and by extension in life, it comes down to finding the balance. Perfect is good, but good is better. Through my artwork, it feels like I'm losing my way in the right direction. Do you understand?
back to gallery
