_{still: Transformation by Holding Time (Landscape) (Paul de Nooijer, 1976)}

Paul de Nooijer (1943–2025) studied at the Academy of Industrial Design in Eindhoven from 1960 to 1965, where he was taught by the experimental filmmaker and visual artist Frans Zwartjes. Together with Zwartjes, De Nooijer made Moving Stills (1972), his debut. In much of his work, De Nooijer gives reality a bizarre twist and attempts to outwit time.

Paul de Nooijer’s film work can be seen as an attempt to ward off the inexorability of time, as in Transformation by Holding Time (1976). In this film we see Polaroid photographs of a naked, white-powdered woman (De Nooijer’s wife Françoise) slowly disappearing from view. At the same time, the film frame is filled with Polaroids of the vanished woman – film and photography merge virtuously, with the passage of time added to the photographic work.

De Nooijer’s pioneering work is difficult to capture under a single label: it is at once personal and alienating, tragic and comic in nature.

Farewell to an oeuvre
Paul de Nooijer’s son Menno (born 1967) appeared in his photographs and films from an early age. From 1989 onwards, the two worked together intensively, almost as a matter of course. Their collaboration continued in later performances combining film, slides, text and installations.

De Nooijer’s wife Françoise often acted as producer, muse and performer in this work. Until recently, father and son De Nooijer were working on a final production, in which they examine their work in a distinctly personal and visual way.

_{Still: Is Heaven Blue #2 (Paul and Menno de Nooijer, 2023)}

Time leaves its traces
A key work in the oeuvre of father and son De Nooijer is Is Heaven Blue? #2 (2023). This masterpiece is a spellbinding, powerful farewell to fifty years of extraordinary collaboration as an artistic family. The film received awards at international film festivals, including the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Is Heaven Blue? #2 shows how time leaves its marks on the bodies of three De Nooijers: mother, father and son. It is a farewell to an oeuvre, the result of fifty years of making art together and living together through photography, animation and film.

Read more about the life and work of Paul de Nooijer here.