All rights reserved: @Mariejon de Jong-Buijs, 2024
I am a Dutch-born artist, currently living and working in Basel, Switzerland. My process-based work is inspired by the tradition of Dutch landscape painting—rooted in both my early experience working on farms and my deep visual engagement with the history of the genre. Rather than representing the landscape, I seek to reconnect with it and my memories of it through the act of making. Many of my works begin their lives outdoors. I create large-scale paintings, often characterized by saturated colors, geometric shapes, repetitive patterns, and the folding of the canvas.
My work continues the tradition of abstraction while incorporating elements of Geometric Minimal Abstraction. I am interested in how paint can be used to create marks, inscriptions, and gestures through non-traditional applications—using tractors, back-sprayers, and other working tools, as well as engaging my entire body both in and outside the studio.
I understand my approach to painting as a process of making the vicissitudes of paint visible. The resulting works expose the interactions between process, tools, materials, and movement. Traces of paint accumulate, residues adhere, and the elements leave their own imprints. My practice is deeply attuned to process, unfolding in time through the performance of specific and often repetitive actions across the canvas.
Still working within the tradition of the painted canvas, I remain committed to exploring new ways of taking painting beyond the easel.
Basel, Switzerland 2025
Mariejon de Jong-Buijs