Macchia: Jesse Willems

Jesse Willems (b. 1984, Antwerp) is a Belgian artist whose practice combines photography and collage. Using photographic prints wrapped in vintage papers sourced from flea markets, he creates abstract works that invite viewers to reconsider photography’s ability to represent reality.

By cutting, wrapping, and reassembling photographic prints, Willems frees his compositions from a fixed reading and draws attention to what is usually overlooked. Influenced by the avant-gardes of the 1920s, his work moves towards an abstraction rooted in the sensory world.

Macchia — the Italian word for “stain” or “spot” — refers to an art theory developed by the Neapolitan critic Vittorio Imbriani and revisited by writer and photographer Teju Cole in his essay Google’s Macchia (2013). Macchia describes the total effect an image has on the viewer in the split second before interpretation begins: what we feel before we understand what we are looking at. It is precisely within this space that Jesse Willems’ work operates. By cutting apart and recomposing fragments of the visible world, he seeks to reach that moment before meaning emerges, where form and colour alone take effect.

 The exhibition Macchia brings together around twelve new and unique works from the artist’s most recent body of work.