Text written in Basque and translated automatically by Elia without any subsequent editing. SEE ORIGINAL

The painted X-rays

"That's art," they say, when they saw the X-rays; and that's when Arie Van't Riet became the artist. Van't Riet is actually defined as a medical physicist. He's an X-ray specialist. At a TEDxGroningen conference in 2013, she tells how she started using X-rays to make art. One day, a friend asked a painting to do an X-ray. It was a very thin thing, and I'd never done an X-ray of anything like that. He decided to try it and was surprised by the result.

Then he thought about trying even finer things, like flowers. Being from the Netherlands, he did his first test with a bouquet of tulips. He took out several plates, digitized them and gave them color on the computer. And he kept doing the X-rays of the flowers. Until he realized that he was missing something: the animals.

It started with insects. He put them between the flowers and saw that it looked very good. In fact, radiation was similarly absorbed by the wings of butterflies and dragonflies and the petals and leaves of flowers.

Then he began to introduce larger animals. To begin with, he bought a dissected bird without knowing that the dissected animals only have skin, so it was of no use to him. Then he went on with the dead animals on the road, the dead reptiles gathered by his friends, or those brought by the children of the area. He takes plants, branches and animals and places them between the X-ray tube and the plate to make natural compositions that he calls "biorama". When the elements have very different thicknesses and densities, it is not easy to obtain a good image. In these cases, Van't Riet plays with different X-ray energy discontinuity intensities, so you can see everything in the same image. Now the artist is trying to make bioramas in three dimensions.