Johan Van Mullem Democratic Republic of the Congo, b. 1959

The work is a surrealist landscape/skyscape that focuses on the essential energies of life, namely "cells" the very building blocks of nature that live in, around and of us, both physically and psychologically. In this work, the artist choose to get rid of everything none essential and paint only the building blocks of nature - these figures could seen as abstractions of trees but they are the essence of a tree, the cells, energies and veins that form a tree - the very living part of the tree. Van Mullem is interested in how trees have the same building blocks that we do (in other works from the series he examines rainbows and gold having the same building blocks as us). The artists has always been more interested in the similarities that we have with nature than differences - the new work studies this on a cellular and subatomic level.