Chantal Elisabeth Ariëns (b. 1968 Heerlen, the Netherlands) is an Amsterdam-based visual artist. Educated at The Ballet Academy in Tilburg, Ariëns worked as a professional dancer, photo model, and assistant photographer. At the age of 30, she started her photographic career and since then has worked for international magazines such as Marie-Claire, Red, and Crash Magazine, just to name a few.
Since 2017, Ariëns has been working exclusively on her personal projects. In doing so, it is important to her to be able to work completely freely and independently. In her images, which are cinematically inspired, she conveys poetic grace, fragility and at the same time self-determination. Ariëns´ dreamlike and sometimes melancholic fashion photographs have nothing to do with fashion photographs as we have stored them in our collective memory - namely as a reflection of glamour and shiny commodities or as photographs in documentary snapshot aesthetics. Instead, they appear as if removed from time and space.
The uniqueness of her imagery is enhanced by using photopolymer etching, an old printing technique. In this process, the motif is brought forth through a printing plate sensitized with photopolymer film by means of contact exposure. This process gives her the opportunity to act like a painter when doing the final prints leaving room for accidental elements where they are.
As poetic and dreamlike as her works appear, they are certainly on the track of a particular reality: a transient moment, the boundary between being and passing away, the irretrievable instant when in a gesture or silhouette, in a special incidence of light, an emotional aura and intensity appear. She invites us to experience a few soulful moments with her. And so it comes as no surprise that Chantal Elisabeth Arïens gives herself plenty of time for her shoots and works in slow motion, waiting for the decisive moment.