Joël Moens de Hase
Born in Belgium in 1959, Joël Moens de Hase is revolutionizing the art of portraiture with his hypnotic photomosaics, which appeared in 2011. In the background, thousands of photographic fragments of female curves. In the foreground, an image charged with intensity: a face, a symbol of intimacy, an unsettling presence. This alternative digital art, contemporary with pixel art and pointillism, immediately won over an international audience with the originality and radical aestheticism of its concept. Behind each work lies an obsessive process: the artist scoured over 20 million images on the Internet, selecting 100,000 photographs which he cropped one by one, then assembled using powerful software until the whole made aesthetic sense. The result? An explosion of color and sensuality that frees the imagination and arouses the senses.
His work is a perfect reflection of our digital, hyper-connected society. These thousands of tiny photographs give his creations a dizzying depth, an impression of infinity that echoes the over-representation of images - advertising, erotica, media - that saturate our daily lives. Each work offers a two-dimensional reading, in terms of both content and form. Technical complexity rubs shoulders with apparent visual simplicity, creating a rare intensity that simultaneously unsettles and fascinates.
Beyond aesthetic prowess, Joël Moens de Hase pays homage to femininity, desire and eroticism at their noblest. At the heart of his paintings is passion, man's attraction to woman, the one we desire in secret or openly, the one who devours from within. These faceless women are an invitation to dream, to the sublime, embodying both the divine creator and the object of desire. But it is also the free woman who unfolds: free to dispose of herself, to offer or refuse herself, to be mother and mistress or neither. In transparency, it's love in all its forms that the artist illustrates, a space of visual freedom where every collector can project his or her own fantasies and emotions into an infinitely sensual and profoundly human universe.
The artist's works
