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

My works are inquiries into the techniques used to represent apparent (visual) 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 have always been inspired by video games that attempt to imitate reality. This construction, translation, or simulation of apparent reality on a two-dimensional surface it shares with all arts that have aimed for realism, and especially with painting.

What's important are not the images that are generated, but how they are generated - what techniques are used in 3D computer graphics and throughout art history. In my work, I combine these two diverging fields - painting and CGI - that have the mutual purpose of constructing a virtual world.

My reference material often is random - photographs of textures I find fascinating, pictures I finds in books or on the internet, consumer objects - and it's the history and tactility of the subject, the technical possibilities of its translation, and the implications of such a transition 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 show 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.
A painting of that same door within an interior (where, incidentally, it loses its relative levelness) becomes harder to accept as a part of our current paradigm of reality. Suspension of disbelief plays an important role in this context.

These parallels have consequences for the reading of images. They put an emphasis on the character of the image, and its frame.
My works touch upon matters of objecthood, iconography, spatial construction, light simulation, and spectatorship:

• How does an image relate to what it depicts?
• How do we read images?
• 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 volume, light, and tactility be translated?

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