Hans Zantman

Dutch artist Hans Zantman took a seeming detour in his pursuit of his passion for painting and drawing, when he declined opportunities to jump into art scene immediately after attending the Graphic Design School at Rotterdam and the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, the Netherlands. Instead, he broadened his experiences through graphic design and physical labor jobs, while striving to find his own voice and style, therefore his true self, in an honestly way. Happily, in 2006, Zantman arrived at a juncture where he had emerged with a distinctive and innate style of his own.

Zantman’s works are deceptively austere and simple, with very economic palettes. Yet, upon close inspection, they revealed themselves to be windows of various sizes to the kaleidoscope of the world, people's souls and the universe, simple yet rich and virtuosic, and full of depths and emotions, through the myriad textured layers.

Equally at home with representation and abstraction, he employs interplays of definitive outlines and the painterly background/foreground washes, giving his works a patina of a distant age and a sharp declaration, especially in his abstract works, whose angular outlines announce them boldly, almost accusingly. He strives to be honest and brave to present unstinting emotional self-revelations. His paintings and drawings captured the anxiety, the anguish of our somewhat hallucinatory and nightmarish machine age with clear-eyed insight and in his more melancholic figurative works, the nostalgia. 

(Matthew Felix Sun - 2012)