Ben Kruisdijk Röntgen Etchings: Treated X-Ray Photography

If you are a regular reader on cultcase you must remember X-Ray Photography as Art: Hidden Faces of The Inner Space where we presented a few prominent works from Nick Veasey, Diane Covert, Bert Myers and Steven N. Meyers. Recently we have been honored and privileged to meet another great X-Ray photographer - Dutch artist Ben Kruisdijk. It was around 2004 when Kruisdijk was a student at the academy when he took his first experiments with Röntgen photos and by now his photos can be described as "drawing x-ray photography hybrids" or as he calls them "Röntgen Etchings".



The person who owns the body of his works is always of little or no importance as Kruisdijk is a formalist, interested in the language of the photo more than in the subject. The images are very expressive, sometimes horrible, and include tumors, broken bones and the like, but also fantastic animal hand drawings and always shown in the most aesthetic form.



As a draughtsman, Kruisdijk likes to treat the photos with a technique he describes as "etching" aiming to relocate concepts and images from the medical world to the art world. "The Röntgen etchings are strongly related to my paper drawings", explains Kruisdijk. "Conceptually they are the same and only differ in their material."



According to Kruisdijk's artist statement, his unique visual language allows him "to create an abstract framework" in which he can "think and dream without obstacles". A space in which "all possible steps can be made without having to obey the laws of physics."



For more art from Ben Kruisdijk ...