Jukka Mathijssen

My sculptures arise in the space between iconography and instinct, between the sacred and the everyday. They are places of encounter, between eras, between aesthetic systems, between canon and culture.

I draw from the visual language of the Renaissance and the Baroque, where the human form was not just anatomy but a carrier of belief, power, and desire. The Renaissance gave the body proportion and meaning; the Baroque breathed life into it full of movement, emotion, and drama. I rediscover that abundance not as historical ornament, but as a timeless visual force.

Where Neoclassicism longed for order and heroism, I see tension, controlled forms with a crackling undercurrent. And where Romanticism fled into the sublime and the mysterious, I recognize the urge to make the inner world visible.

My figures also balance between control and rupture, between the monumental and the intimate. At the same time, I am a child of postmodern visual culture. Comics, films, game worlds they are not opposed to classical imagery, but a continuation of it.

Just as postmodernism quotes styles without hierarchy, I compose images in which heroes from different time periods intersect. One figure carries the pathos of Caravaggio, another wears the mask of a comic book hero. They are not caricatures, but avatars of a visual memory in constant mutation.

My work is not a reconstruction, but a questioning. What endures when form, meaning, and identity are continually rebuilt? Each sculpture is an attempt to connect a fragment of the past with a possible future, without losing what lies in between.

I don’t believe in style as dogma. My sculptures are hybrid bodies: part relief, part relic; part pop, part pomp. They have fallen out of time and precisely for that reason, they belong to the now.