Studio Alexander Claessen

NOCKNOCK ART FAIR — AMSTERDAM

From 5–8 March you can find Studio Claessen at NOCKNOCK Art Fair in the Kromhouthal, Amsterdam.

NOCKNOCK is an artist-driven fair where visitors meet artists directly — artists, no galleries.

📍 Booth A.18 — Studio Claessen

For more information and opening hours: .art

Title: The Hand That Edits Marble

Oil on linen
100 × 80 cm

In this painting, a living figure presses her hand over the mouth of a marble statue. The gesture is intimate yet forceful — the present silencing the past.

The statue represents what we consider fixed: history, memory, inherited narratives. Marble suggests permanence and authority, the illusion that truth is solid and unchangeable. Yet even stone can be muted. Even what feels eternal can be reshaped by those who live now.

Throughout human existence, history has been written, erased, and rewritten according to the interests of power. Empires glorify themselves. Regimes revise memory. Generations reinterpret what came before them. The past does not speak for itself — it is spoken for.

The painting asks: What is the truth?

Is it the original event? The surviving record? The dominant version repeated over time? Or is truth something unstable — constantly negotiated between silence and voice, between memory and control?

The warm flesh against cold marble captures this tension. The present is alive, and therefore powerful. The past, though monumental, remains vulnerable.






The hand that covers the statue’s mouth is not only an act of suppression — it is an act of authorship.

Title: Piled Bicycles in Snow
Medium: Oil on linen
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Feb, 2026.

A vertical stack of bicycles rises like a fragile monument, their frames intertwined and frozen in place. Painted in cool blues and whites, the snow quiets what once symbolized movement and freedom. The composition balances tension and stillness—chaos held together in silence.

An intimate meditation on pause, suspension, and the beauty of halted motion.

ESTATE
100 × 80 cm
Oil on linen

There is a particular silence that belongs only to summer.

Not the absence of sound, but the presence of warmth — sun on skin, salt in the air, white fabric moving slowly in the coastal wind. In Estate, I was not searching for a perfect body or an idealized moment. I was searching for weight. For light that presses against the figure. For the quiet strength that exists in ordinary gestures.

A man hanging laundry becomes something almost monumental under Mediterranean light. Strength reveals itself not through performance, but through stillness — through the simple act of being present inside one’s own body.

While painting this work, I resisted the temptation to polish away irregularities. Real presence lives in asymmetry, in tension, in the subtle conversation between light and shadow. The sun does not flatter — it reveals.

Estate is ultimately a meditation on masculinity without spectacle. On vulnerability without fragility. On the poetry hidden inside daily rituals.

Summer, after all, is not only a season.

It is a state of exposure.

Title: rest.
oil on linen — 100 × 120 cm

Sleep is the moment the body stops performing.
A quiet surrender to the truest self.

Here, social and cultural roles loosen their grip.
What remains is breath, weight, stillness.

Behind him stand Adam and Eve —
masculine and feminine energy, eternally awake,
holding the myth of choice and consequence.

He does not choose.
He rests.

Masculine energy softens.
Feminine energy becomes space.
Power is not asserted, but released.

Sleep is not escape.
It is a return.

THE STILL MOMENT OF EDEN.

A breath held by the universe.
The sky burns quietly, the day refuses to end —
and the world has not yet fallen,
but it already knows it will.

Two bodies, carved out of innocence and longing,
stand at the edge of becoming.
The apple glows — not as temptation,
but as a promise:
knowledge, pain, freedom, consequence.

A hand reaches.
A destiny answers.
And Eden — perfect, fragile, trembling —
is already vanishing in the very act of awakening.

This is the silence before history,
the second before exile,
the moment when paradise chooses to know itself.

120 × 80 cm — oil on linen
December 2025

✨ New prints now available! ✨
Bring the emotion, depth, and story of my original paintings into your space. Each print captures the essence of my work — perfect for collectors, art lovers, or anyone wanting to add a bold, expressive touch to their walls.

🖼️ High-quality prints, limited editions.
📩 DM to order.

I sometimes paint about loss not to hold onto sorrow, but to reveal the quiet truth we all share.
Loss is not the opposite of life — it is woven into it. And when we dare to show it, speak it, and honour it, something gentle opens inside us.

In a world that celebrates only achievement and happiness, I try to create space for the moments in between — the tender pauses, the shadows that teach us where our light begins.

Life sometimes arrives with unexpected weight, yet within those moments lie the seeds of transformation.
Loss shapes us, softens us, deepens us. It invites us to rise again with a fuller heart and a clearer sense of who we are becoming.

These paintings are my way of saying: you’re not alone in what you carry.
There is beauty in the cracks, and strength in every person who chooses to stand back up, quietly, bravely, and entirely themselves.

——

My exhibition ends next week the 18th of November at Galerie de Vlugt in Amsterdam. Hop on over if you want to see the works in real.
Adress: Burg. De Vlugtlaan 125, Amsterdam.