About the Artist:

Ivan van den Broek

My life began in loss.
The dull sound of earth falling on my mother’s coffin has never left me. I was ten. After that, silence became the language of our house.
My father drowned himself in alcohol, violent and unreachable. Many mornings I locked him in his room before leaving for school. Sometimes I found him passed out on the floor of the pool hall where I spent my days, friends stepping over him as if he were a stain on the floor. I was fourteen. That image never left me.
There was no love, only noise and absence, a home without safety or warmth.

By fifteen I had left. I carried one question: if there is something beyond this suffering, show me.

That night I carved the words into a piece of wood and placed a small dove’s feather on it. In the vision that followed, a presence appeared and handed me a feather. I woke trembling, and a week later found that same feather lying in the grass.
When I picked it up, the world broke open, light in my chest, tears from somewhere deeper than sorrow. It was gratitude so vast that the body itself had to speak, as if life had turned itself inside out and, for an instant, everything made sense.
It was not a decision or a ritual; it was instinct, the body finding a language for what words could never hold.

But revelation is never an ending. It begins a lifelong struggle, how to live with what cannot be forgotten, how to honour what is known when the world around you does not see.

Soon after came two buzzards, untouched, no wounds, no decay, the claws still soft as if life had only just left. Their stillness carried the same intelligence as the dream, reality answering back.
Carl Jung would call it synchronicity, but that word only grazes the surface. What followed was not a single event, but a continuing coexistence, a tension between revelation and survival, between the mind’s need for control and the vastness that cannot be denied.

For more than thirty years I have lived inside that dialogue. It is not belief and not madness. It is trust, trust in something that cannot be described, yet cannot be denied. Too many signs have appeared in the here and now to dismiss it as imagination.
To live with it is not to control it, but to allow it, to stay open to what keeps revealing itself.

My art grows from that openness.
Drawing and painting are ways to give the unspeakable a form that does not betray its origin. The works are not about mysticism; they are about coexistence, how vision lives within structure, how silence breathes within noise.

Constructed Silence stands in that space, where revelation and reality meet, where what cannot be explained still demands to be seen.

The roots of my work lie at the meeting point of psychology, ancient vision and modern science.
Carl Jung described synchronicity, the meeting of inner and outer events with meaning, as proof that psyche and matter arise from the same source.
In shamanic traditions that truth is lived, not analysed, reality itself is seen as a responsive field where signs, dreams and events speak a single language.
Today, Integrated Information Theory echoes that same insight in scientific terms, describing consciousness as a structural property of reality, not confined to the brain but woven into the fabric of systems that integrate and respond.

These voices do not contradict one another; they converge.
My work stands at that convergence, not to explain, but to reveal the silent field where psyche, matter and awareness are one.