J.J. Seinen
José Johann Seinen, born in the Netherlands in 1934, produced, with obsessive care, a unique body of work that could be compared to a personal mythology where archaeology and science fiction are intertwined. It is a spectacular project, one that also poses the question of the game in art.
When his parents, suspected of collaborating with the Germans during the Occupation, were imprisoned at the end of the war, José and his five brothers were placed in the custody of their grandparents, who lived in Amsterdam. There, he began drawing tirelessly: exercise books designed like pop-up books filled with robots and – from the start – careful, minuscule cut-outs, small figures of a private theatre that the boy moved around in sets drawn to their scale. As a young adult, Seinen was employed at the bank where both his father and grandfather had worked, married and had a daughter. His wife and child left him late in the 1960s. He then opened a travel agency where he met his second wife, who came from Colombia. They agreed to live alternately in Amsterdam and then Bogotá, moving every seven years. But he never returned to the Netherlands and when his beloved mother died, Seinen had the entire contents of his house, wooden flooring included, packed up and sent to Colombia. He spent the rest of his life there, shutting himself up for days on end in a small, spartan room to escape into his own universe. Seinen, extremely erudite, had extensive knowledge of ancient history and owned a library of thousands of rare books. A penny-pinching man, he wore the same badly made striped three-piece suit whatever the season, and smoked one cheap cigarillo after another.
When he died in 2013 at the age of 78, his wife discovered 22 boxes filled with his life’s work: thousands of extremely precise drawings, serial accumulations of figures and objects, often carefully cut out and classified in envelopes: Mesopotamian gods, Greek and Roman buildings, entire armies, pottery from archaeological digs, extra-terrestrials and more.
J. J. Seinen has left us with an enigma, that of a child hidden in an adult’s life, who seems to have pursued his waking dream.