Maarten Demmink has been painting disasters for over twenty years. Known as Demiak, the Dutch artist moves between painting, photography, and sculpture—documenting catastrophes like Lisbon 1755, Katrina 2005, Deepwater Horizon 2010 as damaged vintage photographs or staged dioramas. His work depicts ruins without the people who suffered them. He describes collage as destroying existing images and building them into new ones, giving shape to fragmentation. For two decades, he’s worked in buildings about to be demolished, making work about precarity from inside it.
TWS –You’ve worked in temporary spaces—former schools, ramshackle offices, buildings slated for demolition—for over twenty years. How did this begin, and how has precarity shaped your relationship to architecture and ruin?
MD –Fresh out of art school, I started out with no money, no side jobs, and a cheap studio was a necessity. All I needed was space and light. A little heat in winter would have been nice. There was a lot of vacant office space and empty school buildings around. With a couple of artist friends we occupied whole neighborhoods designated to be torn down. We had nothing but ideas for paintings and a feeling of solidarity towards each other. And a certain knack for temporality. At one time I continued painting while they broke down the first of my four walls.
TWS –Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci appear frequently when you discuss influences. What specifically draws you to their treatment of landscape? Is it the aerial perspective, the light, something else?
MD –What may be the most interesting about these artists is the research it took them, the ingenuity. I read about Pietro Della Francesca that he staged his landscapes in order to empirically learn the laws of perspective. I would have loved to see these dioramas, had they been preserved.
TWS –Hieronymus Bosch is another Old Master you reference. Given that your work avoids his moralizing and fantastical elements, what’s the actual connection?
MD –I love paintings that show different worlds at the same time, night and day, heaven and hell, war and peace. His nightmarish imagination is something I admire. There is an element of fantasy in some of my works, but I think I’m more of a documentary artist.
TWS –“The Big Blow” series depicts major natural disasters—Lisbon 1755, Mississippi 1927, Katrina 2005—but rendered like damaged vintage photographs. You’ve said you use small formats to avoid sensationalism. Why does intimacy matter when representing catastrophe?
MD –I’m trying to make observations about the relation between human beings and their environment, the individual and the bigger picture. So I depicted tragedies that happened centuries ago the same way as catastrophes that happened yesterday. The series can be seen as a couple of fake documentaries. The small archival photo scale provides for the necessary human perspective.
TWS –You paint disasters without depicting the people who suffered them. That’s a deliberate formal choice with ethical implications. Why absence rather than presence?
MD –Almost 40 years ago someone described my works as ‘post-industrial landscapes’. Later that turned into ‘post-apocalyptical‘ even. That could mean a world without people.
I guess you could call this formal choice a form of abstraction. When I paint people the paintings become portraits. And when you do portraits you have to concern yourself with facial expression, personality, identity. They become too explicitly personal, anecdotic.
TWS –Your practice moves between painting, sculpture, and photography. How do you decide which medium a given idea requires?
MD –I let the work decide. Some twenty years ago I started doing collage, because it took me too much time to paint every single idea I had. I used pictures from magazines at first, but moved to making my own. I started creating props, building small houses and making trees out of clay. At that point you might as well call the props sculptures. Usually I start out with a pretty vague idea, and as I go along, I discover what shape the work wants to become.
TWS –I’m interested in how you compose the plywood and canvas works where fragmented realities coexist within a single frame—different materials, different spatial logics operating simultaneously. How do you think about collage as a conceptual strategy even when you’re painting?
MD –Collage is an easy and playful way to create or find compositions. What one does is destroy the existing images and build them into new ones.
Doing collage (whether paper or spatial) is the best way to give expression to a sense of fragmentation, to give shape to the theme of destruction and reconstruction.
TWS –Disaster operates as interruption—a rupture in the flow of normal life. In the “Escapism” series, you make this literal by bisecting canvases: one half shows a house, the other half shows the provisional tent that replaced it after catastrophe. Why compress before and after into a single split frame rather than working diptych-style or sequentially?
MD –Sometimes traces of disaster are deliberately removed, sometimes time and nature erase them. But does that mean they’re gone? People still have to live with the consequences. When we can no longer see these traces, we tend to move on. So I made soothing, pleasurable landscape paintings of the cleaned up locations concealing the disquieting images of the disaster areas. What I did in the Ask the Dust series is more or less the same, but more in the form of montage: these paintings show the visible and invisible or remembered world: present and past, or the rich and the less fortunate.
TWS –The wooden house sculptures function almost as three-dimensional paintings, while for Deepwater Horizon you built scale-model dioramas and photographed them as staged docufiction. Both involve physical construction—assemblage rather than depiction. How does making these objects relate to collage thinking, and when does a disaster need to be built rather than painted?
MD –For the Pine Island series for example I had to smash or dismantle some of the houses and reassemble them to get the right feel or look. It is such a different way of seeing things, depicting or assembling, tinkering as I call it. Most of the time they contradict or even wreck each other. Painting or drawing is creating an illusion, and usually, as soon as you put something threedimensional next to it, the illusion is gone. That’s why I tried to combine the two in my latest work.
TWS –You teach alongside making work. Does pedagogy inform your practice, or are they separate things?
MD –My lessons are mostly quite improvised, and have a lot to do with my own work in the studio. When for some reason I haven’t been in the studio for a couple of days, what I have to offer seems to me like outdated, stale information. So I draw directly from my latest discoveries and failures. What I get in return is inspired people doing interesting stuff. So it’s great, and it doesn’t distract too much from my own work.
TWS –Your work is often described as environmental, but it’s not didactic or activist in the conventional sense. How do you understand your relationship to environmentalism as an artist?
MD –I worry about the world. Climate change, war, overpopulation, the downfall of democracy and civilization. But I don’t like lectures or activism in art. Activism suggests that the artist knows solutions to big and difficult issues in the world. I think art should make people wonder, question things, think for themselves. I would like my work to elicit doubt and confusion. We’re all in the dark, anyway.
Learn More about Maarten Demmink / Demiak: Website | Instagram
