René Beekman, Artist in distribution, Netherlands, 1968

René Beekman was born in the Netherlands in 1968 and lives in Sofia, Bulgaria. He graduated from AKI Enschede in 1992 and has attended music and composition workshops in Paris, Buffalo and California. His work has been exhibited extensively in Europe, North America and East Asia. Beekman's semi-abstract videos are primarily done in greyscale or gentle gradations of colour. The pieces are often based on images of 'natural' subject matter, such as plants, water or fish, which are digitally abstracted and obscured to the point of near or total unrecognizability. The formal subtleties of the images evoke a number of associations including graphic mark-making, 8 mm film and cinematic representations of storms or electricity. The shifts in the images are closely linked to the soundtracks of the videos, which achieve a number of effects including the illusion of aural depth in a three-dimensional space, altering the way viewers perceive the two-dimensional space of the screen.