My practice is driven by a belief in sustained attention, a belief that understanding comes from returning to a limited set of questions, materials, and processes, and looking at them more closely each time. That idea is central to how I work. I am less interested in continually finding new subjects than in discovering how much can be found within a narrow field when it is examined deeply enough.

Photography is that field for me, and in particular the photograph as a physical object. I work with concrete, silver gelatin and analogue photographic processes, combining materials and techniques that demand precision but never allow complete control. Concrete is mixed, cast, cured, and sometimes sanded; photographic emulsion is applied, exposed, developed, and fixed. Each stage is methodical, but also introduces its own uncertainties and imperfections. My work takes shape in the tension between those two forces: the desire to understand and control a process, and the point at which process and material begin to act for themselves. I do not pursue accident for its own sake. Instead, I try to create conditions precise enough for contingency to become meaningful. A crack or a stain becomes something to respond to rather than something to correct.

Images are developed directly onto concrete plates, tiles, and blocks. They have weight, thickness, and texture; they occupy physical space. Often concrete depicts concrete, bringing image and support into a deliberately close relationship. Representation and material become difficult to separate.

This concentration on a small number of materials and problems allows the work to develop incrementally. Each object is both a finished work and another attempt to understand the process that produced it. What interests me is not arriving at a definitive solution or an endpoint, but going deeper each time: repeating, adjusting, looking again.

BIO

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (b. 1976) is a Belgian visual artist and linguist working in Leuven and Amsterdam. His practice is rooted in a sustained investigation of the photographic image as a physical object. Working primarily with concrete, silver gelatin, and analogue photographic processes, he combines rigorous, methodical procedures with materials that resist complete control. The resulting works occupy the border between photography and sculpture.

In this podcast, Jeroen talks about his background and his artistic process (in Dutch).

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