BREAKING #290

A dizzying web

Nicole Ex

Column

November 2025

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

November 2025

It’s wintertime. I’m walking in the dark from the Herengracht to the Keizersgracht, looking at the light behind the windows and the delightful interiors they reveal. I’m on my way to the opening of Off Planet Perspective, the exhibition by Joost Elffers (b. 1946) at the Embassy of the Free Mind, and I am absorbed into a murmuring crowd of people.

The exhibited pen drawings took shape in 2020, when humanity was forced into a global moment of reflection. ‘During that time my drawing practice developed,’ says Elffers, ‘into a world of circularity: circles, spirals, spheres, and vibrations. Thousands of hours of drawing became a meditation on an inner wavelength.’

The work is idiosyncratic – you see strange creatures with human features and abstract fields of circles. Drawings that pull you beyond the surface of the hand-made paper, into depth or into space with its mysterious black holes. A darkness created by the impenetrable and dizzying web of drawn lines.

Elffers’ work fits beautifully in this distinguished period room, which could use a bit of stirring up. It’s the first time that the Embassy of the Free Mind has connected its 17th-century source material from the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica to a contemporary artist like Joost Elffers, who has been drawing from this hermetic source of knowledge for many years. In short: the ‘all is one’ philosophy.

According to Elffers, we humans must learn to look with our hearts: ‘There’s nothing wrong with seeing through the eyes we’re used to, but those eyes are made to solve problems: to find food, seek a lover, protect our bodies. But the eye through which our heart sees perceives unity, and feels affection for this universe and all the beings that exist within it.’

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