Dennis Teunissen
Born 1974 in Doetinchem, The Netherlands
Lives and works in Järna, Sweden

Education

1995–1999 — Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU), Utrecht, The Netherlands — Fine Art
1991–1995 — CIBAP Vocational School for Design, Zwolle, The Netherlands — Advertising and Presentation Techniques

Artist Statement

I paint along the edges of things — in places where functions have disappeared, where buildings no longer remember their purpose, where the landscape begins to speak back.

Twenty years ago, that meant cycling through Utrecht, past the rusty breath of the Cereol factory or the stacked containers behind the Jaarbeurs. Now I walk in Sweden — past abandoned granite quarries, forgotten airstrips, and clear-cuts carpeted with moss — tracing with cooler colours the same movement of decay, repetition, and re-appropriation.

Thresholds and Time

Wherever I am, I work at the threshold: between construction and demolition, memory and premonition, human and more-than-human. My working tempo is slow — fifteen paintings a year is a good harvest. Each surface must be saturated with impressions — photos, sketches, repeated visits — until the canvas feels submerged in time. I want the painting to know the subject better than the viewer knows the painting.

Language and Play

It is not only buildings and objects that I record. Language is equally central. Titles attach themselves to the image like sediment, like coat racks for new meanings. I borrow them from songs, poems, nursery rhymes, road signs, archives: Cosmik Debris, Land of Confusion, En Resa, Questo Misero Modo.

A title is both invitation and deception — it opens and sabotages interpretation at once. In my catalogue raisonné, now comprising more than four hundred works, the “SC” codes march forward chronologically, but the titles dance: punning, quoting, associating. That tension between system and play is fundamental to my practice. The paintings are strictly ordered, yet thematically they resist domestication — porous, receptive to pop culture as much as to classical art history. They recall forgotten news items, misplaced sentences, unwanted aesthetics — always open to the dirt of time.

Material and Process

Materiality is never neutral. My early work was painted with Griffin Alkyd on linen — fast, glossy, cutting. Over the years I have added layers, literally and figuratively.

I mix my own whites (Oxidised White #1 and #2) because titanium white from the tube is too sterile for a world that rusts. The support changes with the subject: waste bales on panel, industrial ruins on cotton, small works on claybord or muspaneel. Even frames can become part of the work, as in Revenge of the Lightweight Dilettante Hippie Pirates, where spatters spill across into the image. Everything may speak.

Entropy and Renewal

What thematically binds my work is a form of cultivated entropy. I don’t see decay as an endpoint but as transition. A cracked paving stone becomes a seedbed for weeds. A discarded container gains the monumentality of a mausoleum. A stretch of asphalt with oil stains suddenly resembles marble.

In Cereol I explored how a factory disappears from collective memory. In Container it was about the aesthetics of mass and displacement. Aerialiens imagines air traffic as both biological threat and wonder. Land of Confusion attempts to cartographically depict mental overload.

Each series grows from observation, yet refuses to be confined to the visible.

Place, Language, and Continuity

Since moving to Sweden in 2013, place and language have become more deeply entwined. Swedish words slip into the paintings — Katarinahissen in the Sky with Diamonds, Halvfull, Hölö Kyrkskola. There is melancholy in the tone, but also dry irony, as in Swedish itself.

At the same time, the Dutch spirit of pragmatic reflection remains. Big Brother addresses surveillance culture with the same sharpness as Stad en Industrie did in 2004. Civilization Phase 2.0 — a 170 cm wide painting of digital noise — links municipal ugliness to global collapse.

The scale has grown, but the questions remain intimate: what remains, what disappears, what begins again?

Archiving as Practice

My practice is not only painting. I document. I archive. The fifteen-volume book project currently in progress obliges me to position every work within a larger story of place, time, material, and reflection.

Works that once strayed on a hard drive — or were stolen in the 1990s — now find their place. I maintain pigment labels, a “Numerical Lexicon” tracing every number that appears in my images, and design posting rhythms for my Instagram page. These are not side issues but forms of deepening. They extend the paintings in time.

An Ethic of Attention

If there is an ethic in my work, it is that of attention. I do not believe painting will save the world, but I do believe it can practice care. Attention is resistance — against speed, against superficiality, against forgetting.

My best studio days are those when the canvas is not explicable but reflective: when a bundle of cables looks like a root system; when a steel structure becomes almost botanical; when a painted face mask speaks not only of pandemic, but of breath, vulnerability, reuse.

Nothing is unambiguous — but everything has a before and an after.

Closing Reflection

In an earlier statement I wrote that I would rather paint weeds than flowers. Fifteen years later, that still holds — but the weeds have grown more complex. They are no longer remnants, but ecosystems. They do not only stand for decay, but for adaptation, mutation, survival.

My task is not to provide the last word, but to hold a space open — a place where meaning is still in the making.

In a world planned for obsolescence, I try with my brush to offer a form of slow resistance. An image is not a conclusion — it is a proposal, a question, an archaeological moment of looking, where the past is not central, but the potential of what may still grow from it.