Joachim Beens is a contemporary visual artist currently working and living in Helsinki, Finland.

My works are inquiries into the techniques used to represent phenomenological/optical reality on the flat surface.

This involves contemporary as well as traditional methods.

Apart from the history of art and traditions of painting itself, I've always been inspired by video games. Not only because they allow one to escape reality, but because they imitate reality. This it shares with all art, but mostly with painting - the construction, translation, or simulation of apparent reality on a two-dimensional surface.

I don't directly borrow from video games. What's important are not the images that are generated, but how they are generated - what techniques are used in 3D computer graphics. In my work, I combine these two diverging fields that both construct a virtual world.

My reference material often is random - photographs of textures I find fascinating, pictures I find on the internet or in books, objets trouvés - and it's the history and tactility of the subject, and the technical possibilities of its translation, that trigger my work.

Computer Generated Images are mostly projected unto flat surfaces, but consist of flat surfaces, too. A painting can be a simulacrum of a single object, as well as a representation of several objects. As an example, a door in a virtual environment can be a simple rectangular polygon with an image of a door mapped unto it, adequate to convey the message, whereas a door-sized painting of a door could be mistaken for a real one.
The effect is often theatrical, as it undermines the nature of materiality and function, like props taken out of context.

These parallels have consequences for the reading of images. They put an emphasis on the character of the image, and its frame.

• How does an image relate to what it depicts?
• When does a surface become an object?
• How does framing the image influence its interpretation?
• How do image and technique relate to each other?
• How can depth, light, and tactility be translated?

Reversely, through videos and animations I emphasize the crudeness and fallibility of digital reconstructions - a more playful and erratic practice that emphasizes the obscure symbolism of CGI and the fallacy of virtual realism.