Studio Uiterwaal Kroes
Aron Kroes and Merette Uiterwaal explore the intersection of identity, color, and perception through a collaborative practice that merges photography and painting.
Using their own bodies as starting points, they transform photographic images into shifting figures, where paint defines character, gesture, and mood. These are not self-portraits but acts of becoming, staged presences that reveal how identity is constructed, negotiated, and experienced in relation to material, color, and light. By situating the body at the center of their work, the artists investigate how identity is both performed and perceived, and how it can be destabilized, remade, and reinterpreted through visual intervention.
Aron Kroes and Merette Uiterwaal explore the intersection of identity, color, and perception through a collaborative practice that merges photography and painting.
Using their own bodies as starting points, they transform photographic images into shifting figures, where paint defines character, gesture, and mood. These are not self-portraits but acts of becoming, staged presences that reveal how identity is constructed, negotiated, and experienced in relation to material, color, and light. By situating the body at the center of their work, the artists investigate how identity is both performed and perceived, and how it can be destabilized, remade, and reinterpreted through visual intervention.
Color is central, both visually and conceptually. Uiterwaal’s color blindness and expanded perception challenge assumptions of visual consensus, prompting both artists to reconsider how color shapes emotion, meaning, and relational perception. Through their dialogue, color becomes not a fixed attribute, but a medium for negotiation, transformation, and tension. The works operate in the space between the seen and the felt, where emotional resonance and perceptual instability converge.
Photography and painting are in constant interplay in their practice. Photography captures a trace of reality, while painting intervenes to alter, expand, or abstract it. In combining the two, Uiterwaal and Kroes create a space in which representation is simultaneously confirmed and questioned, where images hover between likeness and invention. This interplay destabilizes the authority of each medium, inviting viewers to consider how perception is always mediated, relational, and provisional.
Through this collaborative process, the artists explore the instability of perception itself. The works ask what happens when the body becomes a canvas, when seeing is unsettled, and when color, form, and gesture refuse certainty. The outcome is immersive, surprising, and open-ended, creating a visual dialogue in which identity and perception remain fluid, provisional, and performative. In this space, looking becomes an active, interpretive, and relational act, and the work operates as a laboratory for the senses, perception, and the construction of self.