My name is Yonah de Beer and I run INSI art-studios. I have been brought up in a town
close to Amsterdam and I am 24 years old. Over the past year and a half I have been
working from my studio in Amsterdam Oost. It is from here that I practice my craft on a
weekly basis. I have been raised by four homosexual parents, who came from a Jewish and
Catholic heritage. I was raised Jewish, however I have distanced myself from the religion.
Because of my upbringing, I have always felt like I stood outside the normative margins in
society. To others I have always had to explain my home situation, and by extent myself. I
started painting to express; without prejudice of what is beautiful and what is not, without any
sense of good or bad. I started using art as the language to express my individuality.
Whether it be abstract portrayals of certain ideas or thoughts or a simple catharsis, my work
is motivated by the splintering of my consciousness throughout its perception of reality.
My work is philosophy materialized. An example of this is a performance I did in July of
2020. I had the formula for entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, tattooed on my foot.
In normal English the second law of thermodynamics can be understood as the arrow of
time. While this tattoo was being done I did stand-up philosophy, a form of presenting where
I interact with the audience in order to come at a (humoristic) definition for, in this case, time.
The reason why I tattooed this formula on my foot is because that is one of the spots on the
human body that chaves the fastest and therefore the tattoo would disappear within years,
thereby proving the formula.
In addition to seeing art, especially my own art, as philosophy materialized, art to me is also
political, because the personal is political. I cannot purch my emotions and my thoughts onto
canvas without also reflecting on the ideology that gave shape to my perspective. In the
painting series Nostradamus I wanted to reflect on fire. For fire is simultaneously something
natural but also something political. In the series I study fires that seem inherently political,
such as molotov cocktails or gasoline, but also fires that appear natural, such as the fires
raging through the Amazon, Australia, and the Arctic circle. In the current age of
massextentinction, capitalism and globalisation, nothing seems to remain unconnected with
the whole. My art tries to reflect on the interconnectedness of all things.
Finally, my art is there to drown in. To drown in the thoughts that arise; which leads to
interpretation. To drown in the feelings that occur; which leads to understanding the
sentiment. To drown in the individual symbolism that it presents; which leads to
understanding that you don’t understand. My aim in creating art is to reflect the world in such
a way on the canvas that it may add moral and aesthetic value to the world.