After Maastricht, Toward Frankfurt: Jacques Bodin

Last weekend in Maastricht was a success and a pleasure. VERMEER Magazine was on the floor of the EuropArtFair at MECC Maastricht with the magazine and an excerpt from VERMEER on Tour: European Group Show 2026. The conversations, the density of looking, and the company of so many realist painters made the two days feel like the exhibition stepping off the page and into the room.

Art-fair manager Raoul Locht wrote afterward with a first accounting of the second edition. The fair welcomed 2,000 visitors. About 100 sales were recorded at the exit and the information desk; the true number of works sold during the weekend is higher, he noted, because many artists do not fill out the sales forms, and further sales often follow in the weeks after a fair. Visitors gave the event an average rating of 8.6. De Telegraaf devoted two-thirds of a page to the fair. Images from the awards ceremony can be found at europartfair.nl/europartaward. An art project supporting pancreatic-cancer research, still open, has raised just over €7,000: kunstweek.nl/doneer. The next EuropArtFair is set for September 25 and 26, 2027.

Attention now turns to Frankfurt. VERMEER will present the magazine and the group show at the Discovery Art Fair from October 29 to November 1. The online exhibition itself remains open through November 15 at vermeer-magazine.com.

The eight artists of VERMEER on Tour are Chiara Albertoni, Julie Biver, Jacques Bodin, Christoph Eberle, Chris Klein, Lorena Kloosterboer, Agnès Lefèvre, and Gerd Lieder. After Albertoni and Biver, we turn to Jacques Bodin.

Jacques Bodin

Jacques Bodin is a French painter and one of the prominent representatives of contemporary European hyperrealism. He lives and works in Levallois-Perret, near Paris. His paintings begin with his own photographs, which he reworks digitally and then transfers to the canvas. Large formats often require months of meticulous work. He is represented by Plus One Gallery in London.

His subjects look ordinary at first: grass, fruit, hair, trees, vegetation, still life. Treated as extreme close-ups under indirect light, they become studies of texture, color, and perception. Sharp, meticulously painted foregrounds are set against blurred, diffuse backgrounds in which openings, abstract forms, or lines of perspective appear. The first glance is held by precision; the second begins to notice uncertainty and illusion. The paintings ask not only what we see, but how we construct reality through looking.

Bodin has shown widely in France and abroad. Recent exhibitions include Hyper 23 in Zurich; Levallart and L’Hyperréalisme, Plus vrai que Nature in Levallois-Perret; the Église Saint Florentin in Amboise; Plus One Gallery in London; Galería Arte Libre in Zaragoza; the State of the Arts Gallery in Hong Kong; and earlier presentations in Paris, Marseille, Mykonos, Bridgehampton, and China. His work has been reproduced in numerous publications.

VERMEER presents three of his paintings:

• De dos, oil on canvas, 102 × 101 cm
• Renaissance de l’hyperréalisme, 2022, oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm
• Au loin 2, 2024, oil on canvas, 81 × 100 cm

In De dos, Bodin brings an everyday subject so close that familiar detail becomes the entire image. The back of a woman’s head fills almost the whole canvas. Individual strands of hai…