View over Delft

In the series View over Delft, the viewer is presented with a quiet, almost contemplative world in which the fleeting nature of the sky becomes the actual protagonist. The series of images is a poetic homage to those Dutch masters of the Golden Age whose view of light, weather and the infinite expanse above the flat countryside opened a new chapter in European art history – above all Johannes Vermeer van Delft and Rembrandt van Rijn.

Vermeer's paintings, in which daylight penetrates through open windows like a muffled echo, are permeated by an atmosphere that speaks more through silence than through the visible. The sky above Delft – as depicted in Vermeer's city portrait of the same name from around 1660 – is not merely a backdrop, but the bearer of an almost metaphysical tranquillity. It is a sky that breathes, that stretches time, that hints at the human scale in relation to nature. The photographs in the series capture this mood: vast expanses of sky, streaked with passing clouds, shifting between leaden heaviness and light openness, reflect the transcendent quality that pervades Vermeer's work.

Rembrandt's skies, on the other hand, are more dramatic – conveyors of states of mind, inner struggles and divine intuition. In his landscapes and biblical scenes, light and darkness form an expressive field of tension that extends far beyond the visible. This dimension is also echoed in View over Delft. Some of the photographs appear as if painted in chiaroscuro: clouds gather into powerful formations, pierced by individual rays of light that touch the landscape like divine fingers. Here, the meteorological becomes metaphorical, the atmospheric becomes spiritual resonance.

The series thus stands in a conscious tradition of Dutch landscape painting, which – unlike its Italian or French counterparts – has always been a symbol of the inner world. View over Delft continues this line: it is not the city itself, but its sky that becomes a mirror of timeless melancholy, of wonder at the incomprehensible.

At a time when the visible is outshone by the glare of a flood of digital images, these photographs draw the eye back to what the old masters showed in quiet grandeur: that the sky above us carries not only weather, but meaning.