Jaap de Vries makes paintings and watercolours which focus on either the landscape or the body. Typically he works on aluminium, a surface that contributes to the ethereal, ghostly quality of his paintings. There's something disturbing about these bleak, grey-skied landscapes, devoid of human life (it’s a landscape which reminds me of the apocalyptic terrain of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road).

His unflinching exploration of nature and the human body resonates with ideas of abandonment, contamination and decay. But at the same time the silvery, mercurial surface of his chosen medium gives the works a fragile beauty. And it is the status of beauty which de Vries's work jolts us into thinking about, and, going a stage deeper into the philosophical underpinning of his work, with the meaning of humanity itself.

Jaap de Vries was the 45th to register on Saatchi Online when it was launched in May 2006, and over the last two years his work has been spotted on the site by several galleries and museums. He has since exhibited work in the UK and Holland, where he lives, and two galleries in Holland representing him and has been offered a solo exhibition at the FUEL Collection in Philadelphia in February 2009.

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