Behind the cultural landscape
On average I manage to complete twelve paintings a year. They mainly show architectural themes. The images that I use are found in my daily life. Cycling from my home to the studio have been and are of great importance.
In the vicinity of closed factories, construction sites and overgrown junkyards you can see that the difference between thriving industry and, after time, the last vestiges are not so great. Almost everything is still there - it's just abandoned, discarded, obsolete. In short it is my intention to portray the back of the cultural landscape, which should result in universal images. I will not just make statements on impermanence or criticize consumer society. First of all I want to show what remains after human presence and activity have ceased. Everything that exists has once been non existent and will without a doubt in the future cease to exist, even though there is a phase in anything we can create or think of may seem beautiful and timeless. My interest starts when that phase is over and something else begins to emerge. I paint, metaphorically speaking, weeds rather than flowers.
Or, as was clearly expressed in an article to accompany the exhibition City and Industry in 2004: "Dennis Teunissen registers with ruthless clarity the surprising beauty of the remains of human economic activity: a continual building up followed by decay, with only dented cars and rusty coal wagons as silent, abandoned witnesses."(Femke Zijp in Nova Terrra magazine).
