In his reflections on Vermeer, Vanderheyden offered an invaluable insight in response to this question: “Vermeer’s neurons seem to be linked, by way of the visual cortex, to our own eyes: a physical reproduction.” He underscores the role of painting—as opposed to other media—to make visual connections across time. In Vermeer’s paintings, we see the room that Vermeer saw (and the social world around it) better than we would in a straight photograph. And yet both the technology of photography and of painting are deployed: Vermeer used the inventions of the 17^th century, such as a range of lenses for the camera obscura, to first register the image, but the crucial moment was the use of luminous paints to bring the projection in line with his vision.

In his inkjet print Vermeer’s Milk (1994), made almost thirty years ago and now on view at TMH, Vanderheyden amplified a detail of the Milk Maid (1660) to highlight the abstract qualities and dispersion of color underpinning Vermeer’s objects and the mystery of their iconographies. The artist’s mental image is at the heart of the work and is meant to be shared. It is remarkably prescient that Vanderheyden’s works came to express a view of painting—Vermeer’s masterpiece View of Delft (1656-60) remains a touchstone for him—that links art history to now. He found that the sensuous qualities of color (acrylic or digital in his case) could frontline painting as one of the most relevant forms of the spatial organization of knowledge.

Vanderheyden’s view of painting is further advanced in his books, which were published and exhibited as self-contained works. Both functional and unconventional, they draw attention to what he referred to as the “natural clarity” of expression and to how he responded to the then prevailing practices, such as art photography and appropriation. Already in the early 1990s, for example, he seemed to have analogized the flow of information on monitor screens to cosmic radiation: images pass through and remain blank, like white noise, until one’s mind captures them and makes them original, individual, and meaningful.

While interrogating the crossovers of science, society, and art in different mediums such as video, photography, digital sound, and installations, Vanderheyden would take up and abandon painting—creating, by way of these periodic reversals and moments of surrender to new mediums, some of the most radically post-minimal, post-painterly works. It is as though what mattered most was not to confront the world’s overextended infrastructures, but to invite us to contribute our own knowledge, to prompt us to enter into the technological flux in order to understand its direction and impact on life (and art).

The show is organized in collaboration with gallerist and art historian Fred Wagemans. Texts by Marsha Plotnitsky.