Carceri Piranesi Revisited nr.1 Print - Limited Edition of 1

Harold Schouten is a Contemporary Artist living and working in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Schouten’s prolific career has seen his works exhibited in group and solo shows at the top art galleries in the Netherlands. Schouten’s works can also be found in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Harold Schouten’s latest body of work explores themes of life by the sea and the modern underwater landscape. At a young age, Schouten became fascinated with the sea and began translating the shapes and patterns he saw in the water onto the canvas. For Schouten, “it was always a dilemma to capture a liquid as elusive as water. You can’t grab it or hold onto it. As soon as one puts a brush on the canvas, it always seems like the image before you is slipping away. Water is as much, and at the same time, as little as paint in a tube.” The relationship between the water and the sky is undeniable. Above the water there are the clouds – the ever-changing subject of the water. The sea is always being transformed by the sky that is her fixed companion. Joining these two worlds is the imaginary but ever present receding horizon. Under the surface however, unfolds a miraculous world, the world of the unseen and the unknown. It is interesting to see modern science race to actualize the sustainability of life on the Moon and even Mars when the depth of the Earth’s oceans remain relatively unexplored. This is what first encouraged Schouten to look beyond the surface of the sea to the imaginary landscapes of the underwater abyss. Forgotten in the past by the media, the world’s oceans have been put to the forefront of the ecological campaign as its dark secrets have come to the surface. In this series, the underwater landscapes painted by Schouten acknowledge the global ecological disaster caused by human plastic debris. The underwater garbage dumps created by excess plastic in the sea have changed the landscape of the ocean in a peculiar way. From above, what is viewed as a maritime tragedy shows something different from below. From this perspective you begin to see strange but beautiful flowers and abstract shapes. It is these impressive underwater structures that encouraged Schouten to explore this topic through his art.