The Dutch artist Ellen Kooi shines above all through the natural aestheticism that flows from her pictures: meticulously studied landscapes that always stage fantastic characters with a striking presence. At once photographer and set designer, she uses perfect landscapes to produce images that seem straight out of a dream or an extraordinary country. Her work tends towards an ideal in which the search for an eternal balance between beauty and romanticism, reality and fiction takes precedence. The result is pictures full of undertones and nascent contradictions, with characters that speak for themselves, with their solitude, their vulnerability and their relationship to what surrounds them: a distinctive atmosphere, an apparently raw light, an enigmatic, captivating and spontaneous dimension that makes this artist's work a new kind of work. The book accompanies an exhibition produced in partnership with Galerie Les filles du calvaire (Paris), image/imatge (Orthez), the Galerie municipale du Château d'Eau (Toulouse), the Institut néerlandais (Paris) and Galerie Torch (Amsterdam), with the help of the Mondrian Foundation (Amsterdam).