About the artist: Paulus Maassen (Amsterdam, 1970) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. He studied at the AKI Enschede and the Dutch Art Institute, Enschede (Master, 1998). His work has been shown in various exhibitions in the Netherlands. He is currently developing the Silent Alphabet, a series of small-scale painted constructions.
The work of Paulus Maassen departs from painting, but leaves the flat plane. Paint is not used as image, but as material: built up, segmented, and brought together into a structure that remains visually off-balance. The works function as frames without image. They suggest a boundary, but simultaneously leave it open. Rather than an inside and outside, a threshold zone emerges — one in which painting, object, and architecture flow into one another, partly determined by the wall on which they rest. The segments carry traces of repetition and physical action: shifted, repositioned, affixed. This gives rise to a tension between control and distortion, between construction and decay. Maassen investigates how painting can behave spatially without losing its material origin. Maassen is currently working on The Alphabet of Silence. This series translates this research to a smaller scale and consists of a multitude of painted objects on recycled melamine, functioning as self-contained signs — individual elements that, like the larger wall constructions, reference without meaning. Where the larger works use the wall as a support, here the wall becomes a field: together the objects form a notation without language, signs pointing toward something left unspoken.