Mixed Media Acrylic on Linen, 2023, 200 x 100 CM

Intimate Portrait in Mixed Media: Layering and Hidden Color
This mixed media painting presents a large, nearly canvas-filling head rendered in a restrained yet emotionally charged palette of greys and browns. The contours are loosely defined, as if the face is slowly surfacing from the material. Beneath the muted tones lie delicate hints of warmth, soft pink, muted yellow, and pale ivory, barely visible, yet essential. These underlying colors flicker through the surface like fragments of inner emotion, creating tension between concealment and revelation. The background is stark white spacious, quiet, but not cold. It acts as a breathing space, a moment of pause that allows the form of the head to stand out in its full presence. The contrast between the open background and the densely worked surface of the face creates a subtle tension. Because the head fills almost the entire canvas, the work establishes an immediate and intimate connection with the viewer, neither confrontational nor distant, but quietly absorbing.
Mart Visser approaches his painting process through physicality and intuition, building up layers of acrylic and mixed materials through gesture, removal, and rediscovery. In this work, color and material are not just applied, they are revealed, scratched, buried, and brought back. Every mark and trace contributes to the portrait’s identity, not as a likeness, but as a presence. The imperfect, the half-seen, and the broken become part of the visual language. What remains hidden is as vital as what emerges.

Presence as Inner Silence
This portrait does not seek attention but invites proximity. It is not loud or declarative, it is there, quietly and persistently. In a space of light, natural tones, or stillness, this work resonates deeply. It invites viewing without explanation, presence without noise. A painting that does not ask to be understood, but to be felt.