Jurgen Rooijackers

My work reveals the tension between two realities: nature as it is—indifferent, chaotic, free of human meaning—and nature as we perceive it, filtered through our urge for order and aesthetics.

Landscapes are not objective realities—they only come into being in human perception. Without the gaze that assigns meaning, there is only indifferent, unstructured nature. What we experience as landscape is a construction: a subjective interpretation of what we see, shaped by our need for order and beauty.

Most landscape art reinforces this illusion by imposing emotions and aesthetics on nature. However, this projection only reveals our own limitations—the urge to tame the incomprehensible, to translate chaos into something manageable.

My work breaks through that projection. I use photography not to capture nature as it is, but to expose how we experience it: fragmented, contradictory, and often uncomfortable. By manipulating images, I do not create romantic representations, but a total experience that rubs. I deliberately place depth, sharpness and composition in illogical places, not to suggest harmony, but to destabilise the viewer. The results are not landscapes to escape into, but to run into: raw, relentless, and unruly.

It is not ...

Art Academy AKI (ArtEZ), Enschede NL
Fotovakschool, Apeldoorn NL

ArtDocMagazine 2024
Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem 2002
Galerie het Langhuis te Zwolle 2000 + 2001
Sandberg2 te Hoorn 1999
Kunstvlaai3”, (voor Kunstruimte Kampen), Westergasfabriek te Amsterdam 1999
Sandberg2 te Hoorn 1998
“Pole position”, de Fabriek te Eindhoven 1998