AIS/ SALON at the VCO building with Scheltens Abbenes, Elvis Lopez and Pauline van Dongen

'Vitrine', placed in the vitrines of the VCO
 building in Aruba 

'Vitrine' (2010), by Scheltens and Abbenes. 

The specialty of  photographer Maurice Scheltens (1972) and visual artist Liesbeth Abbenes (1970)  is to meticulously arrange objects - chairs, glassware, shirts, perfume bottles - into configurations that have a strong two-dimensional or graphic character. Scheltens & Abbenes reduce their objects to clean geometric lines, showing an understanding that the settings will ultimately only exist as a two-dimensional image. Essential to their work is the process in the studio where they construct their settings. A laborious process, in which Scheltens & Abbenes continuously move things around, painstakingly join pieces together and adjust little details. During this series of steps they take numerous shots and study them together intensively in order to arrive at the right composition.  

Pauline van Dongen in bright daylight

Pauline van Dongen

Pauline van Dongen's fascination for the relation between human and their surroundings is something that keeps feeding her inspiration. By working with sculptural shapes, forms like capsules floating around the body, she examines the space between the garment and the body and tries to emphasize that void in her designs. In 2008 Pauline graduated with a BA in Fashion Design from the renowned Artez, Academy of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands. 

Elvis Lopez at the VCO building 

'Atraco', by Elvis Lopez 

On a daily basis the tall, imposing figure of Elvis Lopez hurries through the maze of studios, exhibition halls and offices of Aruba's Ateliers ‘89, a quiet mecca for the arts housed in a rambling old turn-of-the-century school in the suburbs of downtown Oranjestad. Ateliers ‘89 cooperates with a number of Dutch art academies,  helping young artists to transfer to an art school in the Netherlands.