Dutch artist JCJ Vanderheyden made abstract paintings until the mid-1960s. In 1967, and for a period of almost ten years, the artist stopped painting to devote himself to research into the phenomena of light, time and space, experiments with sound and video, and the building of booths for experiencing time. Since his return to that practice in 1976, his paintings have touched upon recurrent motifs (for example, the skyline and the chess pattern) and have reiterated the same questions and concerns: the intersection between painting and photography, the analogy between the camera and the human eye, the reciprocal relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic, or between the fragment and the whole, to mention just a few. From 1977 onward Vanderheyden has held various retrospective exhibitions in his own country (Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, 1983; Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, 1990 and 2011; and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 2001), but he still remains relatively unknown outside The Netherlands (despite his participation in Documenta VII in 1982).
