Daan Noppen (1977) is an international artist mainly working in drawing and painting. He is best known for his realistic larger than life drawings of portraits and bodies. Physics and it’s relation to our being and our emotions play a big part in his work. The artist plays with notions of reality by projecting time as a physical dimension. Rather than becoming something ‘scientific’ this opens up a visual world of our hidden layers of our desires, our pain and our cry for being loved.

‘Amsterdam based artist Daan Noppen brings a special dynamism to his pencil drawings of still life and portraits. His works are not only eye-catching for their precise layering of details, but also in their massive size that gives his subjects a more palpable presence. A closer look at each piece reveals mathematical equations in between the pencil lines that relate to our reality. More recent works express the artist’s continued fascination with mathematics, geometry and physics as his figures appear to be gauged, dissipate, and intermingle in a void of empty vector space’.
∼ by Hi-Fructose Magazine march 2016 ∼

Daan Noppen’s work has been exhibited in New York(USA), New Orleans(USA), Mexico DF(Mexico), Shanghai(China), Metz(France), Luxembourg(Luxembourg), Munchen(Germany), Traun(Austria), Antwerp(Belgium) and in Amstedam (The Netherlands). The artists Symmetry I&II drawing recently won an A’design Award 2016 in the category Arts, craft and ready made.

Fabric

Introduction
Fabric is a body of work consisting of drawings, paintings and sculptures by artist Daan Noppen. The series of oil paintings are made on wooden panels. The sketches and drawings are mostly coloured pencil on paper, in sketchbooks or on wood.
The sculptures are made of wood.

Fabric
Fabric is largely figurative. Human bodies often take a central role in the works and evoke an emotion by their movement. The people in the paintings seem to be crushed by the weight of geometrical bodies or forces around them. With these often melancholic works Noppen touches upon our daily lives that are constant under pressure by what we, our peers or family demand from ourselves. In the work clearly society and it’s relationship with technology plays a huge role.

The artist clearly has a great obsession with fabric as a material on the body. In his work we can find links to artists like Albrecht Durer and Leonardo Davinci who shared an equal fascination. Their work also clearly pulled from science. The contemporary use of technical fabrics often used for apparel give the body of work a clear anker in our time.

Fabric geometry and objects
The sculptures and layers of geometry in both the paintings and the drawings are an important layer in Noppen’s work. They hint at science, but the artist doesn’t mean for these elements to feel ‘scientific’, rather they should radiate layers of our human being than normally are hidden. They should expose our desires, our pain en our cry for wanting to be loved.

Noppen clearly is not just a painter of draftsman, he is a contemporary artist that controls many techniques, which he masters to draw emotion from the spectator. He forces the viewer to come closer and discover that the paintings emerge in more dimensions than just the canvas.

DAAN NOPPEN
(1977)
ARNHEM, NETHERLANDS
www.daannoppen.com