Graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Maarten Demmink (also known as Demiak) revisits the genre of landscape in the light of his contemporary concerns about environmentalism by the use of different mediums: paintings, mural wood sculptures, mixed media and staged photographs.
Through the motif of landscape shaped by human activity, he seeks to record the instability and the invisible, the time and the history, the traces left by nature and the cataclysms. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 has inspired him docufiction photographs called "The Deepwater horizon". Paintings looking like damaged vintage photographs, "The Big Blow" lists some major natural disasters through the ages. Inspired by the Deep South, "Memoirs of Loss" is focused on ravaged houses, like an echo to a series of small sculptures made in modest materials: pictures of anonymous villas or cabins, evocations of what man builds and weeps over when nature destroys. Since the mid-2010s, he develops other themes into his series of landscapes, such as geopolitical considerations ("Escapism") or the memory of places ("The Book of Sand", "Ask the Dust") while pursuing his pictorial research by combining almost abstract or matierist elements ("Earth", "Labyrinths of Clay", "Urban Tissue").
Without sensationalism, he often uses small formats, more intimate and favorable to introspection. His "vedute" offer a fascinating reflection on nature and our future.