Lemmens' flexible canvases consist largely of written text. With his texts, the artist reflects on the position that ideology, religion, politics, art and economics occupy in society. The materiality of the canvas, the paint and the epoxy give Lemmens' works an unexpected but overwhelming aesthetic quality.
Margriet Schavemaker on Pieter Lemmens:
"Rideo ergo sum" (I laugh, therefore I exist) is how Amsterdam-based artist Pieter Lemmens characterises his artistic motivation and philosophy of life. It is, of course, a verbalisation of Descartes' famous sentence "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I exist). Thus Lemmens stimulates himself and his audience not (only) to think, but above all to laugh. Or rather: he tries to convince the world through his works of art that life is one big joke. Now everyone knows that jokes should not be explained, because then they are no longer funny. In the case of Lemmens' work, however, it is the case that knowledge does more good than harm, as I have come to realise in the last few years of getting to know the artist and his work. The most important question in connection with Lemmens' work is therefore perhaps: What exactly is there to laugh about?
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