Painting through its poetical emotion Episode #1
curated by Valeria Ceregini
Painting through its poetical emotion Episode #1 Beyond the Painting with JosÊ Heerkens, Bettie van Haaster, Linda Arts, Evi Vingerling, Marije Gertenbach SEA Foundation, Tilburg, the Netherlands 12 May – 10 June 2018
Exhibition Curator: Valeria Ceregini SEA Foundation wishes to thank the artists and the galleries that have so generously lent their works to this exhibition: Albada-Jelgersma Gallery, Amsterdam. Dudokdegroot Gallery, Amsterdam. Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery, Amsterdam. SEA Foundation also wishes to thank our trustees, volunteers and supporters who in various ways have helped to bring this exhibition and publication together.
Contents
04 BEYOND
THE PAINTING 08 JOSÉ HEERKENS 12 BETTIE VAN HAASTER 16 ARTWORKS IN THE EXHIBITION 28 BIOGRAPHIES 30 LINDA ARTS 34 EVI VINGERLING 38 MARIJE GERTENBACH 42 COLOPHON
BEYOND THE PAINTING
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the seeds of strife towards the beyond, the abstract and the innermost nature are contained in each manifestation. consciously or unconsciously, they obey the word of socrates: ‘know thyself’. whether consciously or not, the artists gradually turn to their material to test the balance of each separate element’s innermost value, out of which they derive their creations of art. W. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1946.
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Painting, as a philosophy of seeing, was defined in the Renaissance as one of the most noble arts that man has ever used to express reality and himself. Over time, in particular in the 20th century with the rise of artistic Avant-garde, the expression of objective reality was replaced by subjective feeling. Then, it was possible to enter into a perceived world characterised by a synchronous expressive evolution that progressively abandoned figurative art in favour of abstraction. In fact, after the invention of photography (1839), painting has started its modern evolution by progressively renouncing the representation of reality and nature. Human products born from the imitation of nature and as form of knowledge, through different artistic languages, have challenged the notion of art as being »windows on the world«. Nowadays, it is important to focus on non-figurative art in order to explore and better understand the new relationship between art and nature, artist and reality. The reality of the contemporary world is always in continuous transition now more than ever before and, like nature, it has its own language and is impossible to imitate. Abstract painting in particular, can recreate a subjective depiction of an innermost atmosphere and otherworldly values by artistic representation. This kind of representation is closer to intimate feelings of the artist. Therefore, the artist reproduces a new reality related to personal and authentic perception of nature.
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We lost the object, we don’t have any more references with the reality but, at the same time, we as onlookers become part of the artwork itself and grow closer to the creative process. As the American art historian Rosalind Krauss said: »visiting an art work is the art work«. This sentence can also be extended to abstract art exhibitions, where people can walk around the space of consciousness and play an important role as external operator able to activate and complete the sense of the art work by their physical presence around paintings. The spatial experience lived in the reality of a given space makes it an important element to consider as a part of the artistic process. In all the works of the exhibited artists, it is possible to recognise an exploration of space, both inside the painting and outside the limits of the canvas. The focus of the exhibition is the artists‘ research encompassing geometric and expressionist languages as well as using the canvas as a surface or as an installation. This exhibition clarifies how it is possible to go beyond the painting, and overcome the concept of a two-dimensional surface bound to the ordinary idea of painting. The synesthetic effects are at the base of the works. They are able to create an alternative world perceived by sight but, at the same time, felt deeply in one‘s own mind and soul as vibrations. It is not important whether this imaginary world creates a sense of enjoyment. What is important, are the undefined emotions that are experienced by the viewer who becomes cognitively activated, a part of the intellectual process of the artwork. The creative work excites the observer, who is capable of deeper responses and sensations, which cannot be defined in words. Five women in show, five Dutch artists from the international art scene, two generations with characteristic ways of painting the abstract. Instead of softly painted subjects as the women of the bourgeoisie would have done in the past, they decided to be brave and authentic, expressing themselves with a personal approach and method. Each one of them uses a specific palette and visual language which become a unique signature which is instantly recognizable and capable of igniting emotions.
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JosÊ Heerkens by her geometric grid and coloured lines produces an infinite sense of quietness. She prefers horizontal lines, which are closer to femininity and a landscape’s horizon; the simplest lines in nature. She reduces the essence of nature, colours and lines into something absolutely essential. The research of the space in between the full and empty field of colour creates a sensation of relevant and pure clarity. Linda Arts, with her geometric optical abstraction, shows how it is possible to create an imaginary space that transcends the physical space. She produces an illusive gap between the painting and the viewer, who falls at loss. She plays with this line of vision but, at a closer look, it’s possible to see the details and mistakes of her brushstrokes which allow us as the observer to feel more in touch with her traditional approach to painting. On the other side of the spectrum is Bettie van Haaster, a completely different abstract painter, more impulsive and passionate. Her act of painting is expressionist, each of her brushstrokes hits the canvas with the power to create a concretion of colours. The waves of colour stand out, giving a third dimension to surfaces her small-sized painting. Evi Vingerling captures details of reality which seem insignificant and of minor importance to the rest of us. Each element is linked to the perception of reality which is impossible to recognise, because the goal is a balanced mix of bold colours and light shapes. Her abstract creative process shows the importance of every minimal part of nature, which becomes part of our sensory experience. Marije Gertenbach is a very uncommon painter. She plays with the space using unstretched canvas hung directly on the wall which, in turn, becomes part of the work itself. Her way to use the space to produce paintings, which are also installations, engages the onlooker, who is forced to explore the space to encounter different perspectives on her work.
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All the artists are from the Netherlands, an almost flat land. It is possible that their idea of limitlessness and pure sensory ‘no-space’ comes from this part of their cultural identity. What we obtain is a pure vision pared away into a dazzle of pure instantaneity. This is an abstract condition and a moment of transparency and self-knowledge, where the connection to the objects completely disappears and leaves only the pure presentness. These artists sought to express inner truths in their work and – as Kandinsky wrote in his On the spiritual in art – automatically repudiated all consideration of external accidents. The five artists’ emotional power and their capability to give free scope to their finer feelings push art to the apex of our contemporary cultural period, where so often we miss the artistic substance, the soul of art. The abstract painting fades away into the pure visibility, giving the onlooker the opportunity to be close in touch with his imaginary innermost world of soul. Pure artistic form and colour is an expression of the artist’s nonphysical life to create a unique abstract painting, which is the demonstration of a research of simplicity and ease of the rhythm of colour to manner of setting into e-motion. The unavoidable influence and mutual relation between form and colour causes a pure artistic composition where colour assumes a form and vice versa, provoking the observer to feel the harmony and spiritual being of endless. Since the combinations and effects of colours and forms are infinite, abstract painting is inexhaustible. Valeria Ceregini // Exhibition Curator _______ W. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1946. R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1993. This exhibition is intended as the first seed of a traveling exhibition project on abstract painting entitled »Painting through its poetical emotion« which will encompass several exhibitions across Europe and will involve abstract artists coming from different European countries.
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impressed by the vastness of nature, i tried to express the extension, the quiet and the unity. [...] Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; these exist everywhere and dominate everything; their mutual action constitutes the ‘life’. Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, Wittenborn, New York, 1945.
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The Dutch painter José Heerkens addresses the theme of the »vastness of nature« relying on the »equivalence of opposites«. Her pictorial research is based on the spaces and the essentiality of the natural elements through an empirical experience, since, as she herself states, reminding the modus operandi of Leonardo da Vinci, »all can be found in nature«. In 1992 during her journey through Australia, she came into direct contact with the nature and in particular with the immensity of this land. The following artistic production was affected by this experience, being characterised by a musing on spaces and symbolic linearity. These algebrical formulations, in fact, materialised on the artist’s paintings as a simplification of the graphic and chromatic elements. The vast uninhabited expanses as well as the constant presence of the horizon’s line in the Australian and Dutch landscape influenced Heerkens to elaborate her spatiality, symptomatic of her introjected journey into her mind.
The physical space, therefore, becomes a mental space, which is translated onto the canvas by means of lines and geometric shapes arranged along a hypothetical horizontal line. In this way, she creates a dynamic rhythm and a chromatic balancing able to establish the harmony between the elements. The synthesis achieved between lines and colour assumes a dialectic character, according to Hegelian’s idealism, that is reflected in abstract visual textures. Heerkens, through the chromatic approach of rigorous geometric essential shapes and uniform colours, defines a sense of movement capable of producing a difference in optical information which becomes no longer measurable quantitatively, according to the mathematical formula of the wavelength emanated by colour (J.W. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810). The alternation of light reflected by full hatch oil colours modulated by vertical and horizontal brushstrokes
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absence of any reference to reality is therefore found among the open spaces between painted and uncoloured surfaces. From this connection between sign and colour, descending from neoplastic movement, a new relationship is established between human and environment. Moreover, the absence of titles in each of the individual works with references to nature, is symptomatic of the artist’s will to refrain from any direct reference to produces a different colour reaction reality in order to gain access into although the colour is the same. a contemplative and evocative This kind of play of chiaroscuro is sphere of the various phases of the translated by the spectator into a day. The executive and perceived visual rhythmic perception. At interaction with light is a the same time, the oily surface of fundamental and decisive element the painting strengthens the sense of her art; it is traceable in her of movement. The perception of continuous research focused on colour becomes fugitive and the spatial relations which precede iridescent depending on the viewer’s the effects of optical perception. position with respect to the work. The light that penetrates through The systematic alternation of the large windows of her studio is brushstrokes attributes a spatial reflected by canvases arranged onto value to the colour, not only within horizontally placed planes, where the painting but also externally, the artist experiments with stimulating the visual perception of chromatic volumes to define fresh the bystander who comes into spatiality. contact with the most intimate The cosmic sense of space and sphere of the painting. the division into horizontal areas, according to the symbolic criterion Her gesture is always controlled, the introduced by the German intellectual act transcends reality, theosophical circles, represent the even though reality is the starting principal factors in the artist’s point for reaching pure knowledge, choice of format, that in turn figurative essence, the most simple characterises the performance of element. This is made up of simple the entire work. The dimension of and repetitive rectangular forms on the pictorial surface, the cognitive a monochromatic background that, limits (E. Goffman, The Presentation in her more recent works, is given of Self in Everyday Life, 1956) of the by the natural colour of linen. The painting are at the base of the work, - 10 -
since the format itself is already part of the work. Likewise, Heerkens maintains a harmonious modular ratio (Vitruvius, De Architectura, 15th c.), often by a 1:1 scale to establish such an »intimacy condition« according to Rotko who also affirmed in Space in Painting (M. Rothko, Writings on Art, 2006), »the great paintings put you inside them«. Close to the Rothko’s themes on art, as a language of the sublime, she took part in the International Painting Symposium Mark Rothko 2016 at the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils (Latvia). In a Jungian view, Heerkens confers great importance to the choice of colours and materials, as a vehicle through which the unconscious expresses itself in a proper language. The affinities with the master are further found in an epiphany of the colour carefully selected for its spatial qualities and its lyrical and meditative charge. The painting is thus rationalistic, slower, and geometrically structured by simple and linear figures according to a logic very close to Mies van der Rohe’s motto: less is more. This mixture of art and architecture and the historical contaminations between art and architecture are another element that characterises the work and the artistic path of José Heerkens, who on this side, albeit on the basis of different principles, joined the desire for artistic integration as it was for De Stijl (Leiden, 1917-1932).
As her most prominent predecessors in the Bauhaus or AbstractionCréation, Heerkens has finally reached a non-figurative painting through a purely geometric conception via the exclusive use of elements, commonly called abstracts, proposed in new and infinite variations that define her own operative and linguistic practice. In conclusion, it is possible to identify and define an artist’s own pictorial language made of pure colours, geometric shapes and horizontal lines that flow from José Heerkens’ mind to her brush as individual independent works but, at the same time, being part of a more complex creative and spatial logic. Every time she starts to conceptualise and create a new work, according to a never-ending researching process, she is hit by a sort of inner stream of consciousness. In this way, her journey inside creativity will never end.
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the gesture for us will no longer be a fixed moment in the universal dynamism: it will be, definitely, the eternal dynamic sensation as such. everything moves, everything runs, everything turns quickly. a figure is never stable in front of us but appears and disappears incessantly. U. Boccioni, C. CarrĂ , L. Russolo, G. Balla, G. Severini, Technical poster of futurist painting [Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista], 11th of April 1910.
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What distinguishes Bettie van Haaster from other painters is her highly emotional charge expressed via an intense use of chromatism. Her material relationship with colour is at the basis of her expressive research, which manifests itself through the pigments moulding as a living material. Already in her earliest youth experiences, having grown up in the Bollenstreek, a sandy area close to the dunes where tulips spread out, she has shown considerable interest in moulding, from the sand of the Dutch west plains to the clay sculptures and colour material spread with strength and energy. Once she became aware of her talent and her artisticcreative inclinations, van Haaster undertook her course of cognitive research that would eventually lead to the liberation of the pictorial gesture. It becomes fluid to follow this artist’s inner movement and the creative impulse that characterises her every single work. Starting from a natural and spatial fact, whose figurative references are lost even though they are found in the titles of the works, she expresses spontaneous and gestural immediacy in her expressive charge made of few colours. The signs, without direct naturalistic references, become the absolute protagonists of the work as structures of coloured matter. The impulsive gesture is transferred onto the canvas which, from the field of representation, becomes the space of the artist’s action. In this way, she transfers her energy into the pictorial material. The full-bodied brushstroke, dynamically laid and poured out, forms excrescences of colours that retain the energy of the creative act. The painting ripples on the canvas like the waves of the sea break on the rocks, forming an incessant and stimulating movement over an emotional and empathic level. This stream of consciousness is what distinguishes the artistic work of van Haaster, who creates paintings in an endless succession. Her painting as a creative and vital act embraces acceleration and deceleration on the canvas,
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just like life itself, since painting is subordinated to the alternation of vitalistic impulses and moments of absolute stillness. The oil painting, bearing a cultural and artistic value linked to the Flemish tradition, allows her to work on a malleable surface, given the properties of the oil as a slow-drying binder, on which the artist can intervene several times, reworking the painting in several stages. Her vitalistic painting composed of rapid and sudden gestures could clash with this technical choice, but is in fact a fundamental component of her gesture, able to spread the colour through the different qualities and nature of the movement: slow, fast, soft and violent. The dynamism derived from it is the same as the painter, born from her temperament and held back by the colour lying on a horizontal plane to avoid dripping but allowing for solid concretions of colour, witnesses of the spontaneous creative impetus. The expressive value, born from the combined action of the body, mind and feeling of the artist, is accompanied by a great technical ability. This explains the choice of the small format which most of her paintings share, 35x25 cm, since it contributes to the execution of the work according to a useful and functional control at the technical level to express the whole physical and emotional charge of the artist. Moreover, the reduced format allows her to avoid projects, studies or sketches. This allows her to follow the inner creative drive that gradually increases and decreases following the artist’s vital rhythm. Bettie van Haaster’s pencil and watercolour drawings are, therefore, unique and independent works born from the artist’s creativity as a sort of break or temporal suspension from painting. Yet in each of them it is possible to trace the same powerful and abstract communicative force of the pictorial sign, capable of evoking the artist’s existential condition. The chromatic relations, the seemingly random trend of the sign, the dense and tight weave of the brushstroke are van Haaster’s signature which transmits through her gestural sign, the visual and tactile tensions produced by the vitality of the overlapping brushstrokes. This overlapping of the colour plans assigns a primary importance to the succession of the painter’s actions and, at the same time, it describes a homogeneous spatiality without hierarchies or boundaries. In fact, the colour overflows and enters forcefully into the spectator’s visual space. The representation is devoid of a determined direction and the bystander is therefore free to immerse himself in a swirling interweaving of colours and planes, lumps and brushstrokes that reveal how improvisation, although guided by principles of compositional balance, is a founding element of van Haaster’s art. - 14 -
The fragmentation of colour and form are brought together by the harmony of the compositional whole, comparable to the interpenetration of futurist colours where the explosions of light give shape to abstraction. The purist research of colour, highlighted by the choice to use only a few colours at a time, two or three as a maximum, gives birth to a chromatic syntax made of light and shadow, bright and dark. In the last decade, the paintings of van Haaster become paintings of light, inspired by the Venetian Renaissance painting due to the chromatic choice of blue and yellow: van Haaster’s blue indicates space and her yellow indicates light. For example, in Lichaam (2016), she openly declares to have been inspired by the blue of the Madonna from San Giobbe Altarpiece (1487 c.) by Giovanni Bellini for the central body and by the light arrangement of the yellows in the backdrop. The succession of the colours and the abstraction of the form obtained via techniques derived from a process of apparent improvisation, give back a spatial image characterised by the materiality of the colour, spread by touch, which causes visual alterations and shading. Hence the chiaroscuro is derived not only by physics and matter but also by syntax due to the linguistic and spatial use of blue and yellow. The dichotomy derived from spatiality and gesture is what makes Bettie van Haaster an artist with a resolute expressive freedom. She is able to transmit emotions and establish empathic and allusive relationships in those who observe her paintings. Between the fullness and the emptiness of the pigments it is allowed to let one’s own imagination travel among the waves of colour until finding that fleeting image blinded by the artist via repeated actions and abstract manipulations. That inner and individual essence of which only Bettie van Haaster is the caretaker.
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ARTWORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
José Heerkens L17. Evensong 2016 Oil on linen 150 x 150 cm Photo credit Willem Kuijpers Courtesy of the artist José Heerkens L12. Notation 2016 Oil on linen 35 x 35 cm Photo credit Willem Kuijpers Courtesy of the artist José Heerkens L81. Walking into Blue from 5 to 6 2017 Oil on linen 30 x 100 x 100 cm Courtesy of the artist Bettie van Haaster Stellage 2013 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 cm Courtesy of Albada Jelgersma Gallery, Amsterdam
Bettie van Haaster Y 2014 Oil on canvas 35 x 25 cm Courtesy of the artist Bettie van Haaster Dubbel 2014 35x25 cm Courtesy of the artist Linda Arts Untitled # 219 2010 Oil on wood panel 180 x 120 cm Photo credit Peter Cox Courtesy of the artist Linda Arts Untitled # 268 2016 Oil on canvas 40 x 40 cm Photo credit Peter Cox Courtesy of the artist
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Linda Arts Untitled # 270 2016 Oil on canvas 40 x 60 cm Courtesy of the artist Evi Vingerling Untitled 2016 Acrylic and gouache on canvas 200 x 150 cm Photo credit Kristien Daem Courtesy of Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery, Amsterdam. Evi Vingerling Untitled 2016 Acrylic and gouache on canvas 100 x 80 cm Photo credit Gert Jan van Rooij Courtesy Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery, Amsterdam.
Marije Gertenbach It’s a type of C 2016 Oil and acrylic paint on jute 40 x 30 cm Photo credit and courtesy of Dudokdegroot Gallery, Amsterdam Marije Gertenbach Yesterday everything was still blue 2017 Oil and acrylic paint on jute 120 x 90 cm Photo credit and courtesy of Dudokdegroot Gallery, Amsterdam Marije Gertenbach Image of a man; writer 2017 Oil and acrylic paint on jute 200 x 170 cm Courtesy Dudokdegroot Gallery, Amsterdam
Evi Vingerling Untitled 2016 Acrylic and gouache on canvas 200 x 160 cm Courtesy of Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery, Amsterdam
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JOSÉ HEERKENS. L17. EVENSONG, 2016 Oil on linen, 150 x 150 cm
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JOSÉ HEERKENS. L12. NOTATION. 2016 Oil on linen, 35 x 35 cm
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BETTIE VAN HAASTER LETTERS 2013 Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm
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BETTIE VAN HAASTER Z.T. 2017 Oil on canvas, 35 x 35 cm
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LINDA ARTS UNTITLED #268 2016 Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm
LINDA ARTS UNITLED #219 2010 Oil on wood panel, 180 x 120 cm
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EVI VINGERLING UNTITLED 2016 Acrylic and gouache on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
EVI VINGERLING UNTITLED 2016 Acrylic and gouache on canvas, 200 x 150 cm
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MARIJE GERTENBACH IT‘S A TYPE OF C 2016 Oil and acrylic paint on jute, 40 x 30 cm
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MARIJE GERTENBACH YESTERDAY EVERYTHING WAS STILL BLUE 2017 Oil and acrylic paint on jute, 120 x 190 cm
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BIOGRAPHIES
José Heerkens (b. 1950 in Dinther, NL) works and lives in Zeeland (NL). She studied and graduated at the Koninklijke Academie voor Kunst en Vormgeving in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (NL). She exhibited in The Netherlands with several solo presentations. International exhibitions are among others in Bonn (DE), Berlin(DE), Paris (FR), Sophia (BG), Budapest (H), New Jersey (US), New York (US) and Ghent (BE). In 2016 she was invited as artist-in-residence at The Mark Rothko Art Center, Daugavpils (LT) and in 2011 at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany CT, (US). In 2017 – 2018 Daimler Contemporary Berlin (DE) shows her large Evensong works in the exhibition »Last Night’s Fortune Teller«. // www.joseheerkens.nl Bettie van Haaster (b. 1957 in Vogelenzang, NL) lives and works in Amsterdam (NL). She is a painter since 1986. She is a professor from 2016 at Montessori De 10e Meidoorn, Amsterdam (NL). She was a teacher of drawing at Willem de Kooning academie in Rotterdam (NL) from 2005 - 2012. Her works are in the collections of main museums in The Netherlands, such as Museum de Pont in Tilburg, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede. She is represented by Albada-Jelgersma gallery in Amsterdam (NL). // www.bettievanhaaster.nl Linda Arts (b. 1971 in Nijmegen, NL) lives and works in Tilburg (NL). She studied at the Academy for Visual Arts in Tilburg (NL). Her practice consists of paintings, drawings, graphic art, light objects and murals. She has shown her work in Sydney (AUS), New York (USA), Paris (FR), Berlin (DE), Basel (CH) and Antwerp (BE). Within The Netherlands she exhibited, in Museum Belvedere in Heerenveen, Museum van Bommel van Dam in Venlo and Museum De Pont in Tilburg. She is the founder of PIT and workgroup member of PARK both in Tilburg. // www.lindaarts.nl
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Evi Vingerling (b. 1979 in Gouda, NL) studied Fine Art at Georgia State University (USA). She also studied at the KABK, Royal Art Academy, in The Hague (NL) and subsequently took part in the Post Academic program Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (NL) in 2005 and 2006. Her work has been shown in solo shows amongst others at the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam (NL) and at Wiels Brussel (BE). She has participated in numerous group shows amongst others in Marres in Maastricht (NL). Her work is part of numerous Dutch museum collections such as Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and Bonnefantemuseum in Maastricht. She is represented by Kristof de Clercq Gallery in Ghent (BE). // www.evingerling.com Marije Gertenbach (b. 1990 in Beverwijk, NL) lives and works in Amsterdam (NL). She studied and graduated from AHK/Academie voor beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (NL). She was invited as artist-in-residence at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam (NL) in 2016 and selected for the Rupert residency program in Vilnius (LT) in 2018. Her works are present in public and private collections, such as Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar. and CBK Groningen. She is represented by Galerie Dudok de Groot in Amsterdam (NL). // www.marijegertenbach.com Valeria Ceregini (b. 1982 in Genoa, IT) is an Italian art historian, curator and writer based between Turin and Dublin. She earned her degrees in Semiotics at the University of Turin and in History of Contemporary Art at the University of Genoa, to continue her studies in Museology attending the Postgraduate School of Historical Artistic Heritage. From 2015, she regularly writes critical texts and reviews on artists and exhibitions for two Italian art magazines: Juliet and Segno. In the latter, she posted all the essays she wrote on the visual artists in ‘Beyond the Painting’ to introduce them to the Italian art scene and add an italian context. // www.valeriaceregini.wordpress.com SEA Foundation is a Dutch not-for-profit, artist-led organisation in Tilburg, the Netherlands, established in 2011. Over the past few years SEA Foundation became known as an umbrella label for exhibitions, exchanges, support and publications. From 2013 SEA Foundation also runs an Artist in Residence programme – AiR Tilburg – which attracts artists, curators and writers to production residencies that include bespoke mentoring and network introduction programs. // www.seafoundation.eu
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ÂŤ
the stake is no longer the heart, but the retina, and the beautiful soul has now become an object of study of experimental psychology. the abrupt contrasts in black and white, the unbearable vibration of complementary colours, the glistening interweaving of lines and the permuted structures are all elements of my work whose task is no longer that of immersing the observer in a sweet melancholy, but of stimulate him and his eye with him. cit. Victor Vasarely
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The optical-visual illusions are the consequence of the art of Linda Arts. Through her knowledge on theories of form, colour and perception, she explores new visual and imaginative worlds through the elements of light and space. According to the basic principles of Optical Art, whose prevalent character is perceived in her artistic production, the Dutch artist attributes a plastic value to her artworks by generating optical deceptions. Through the wise use of geometric shapes and colours that alternate between shades of black and white she gives life to abstract spaces and illusionistic movements thanks to optical-perceptive features, creating a virtual dynamism in the eyes and mind of the observer. The grey scales and the linear modules that make up her pictorial syntax are the elements that contribute to the production of mental and perceptual effects capable of stimulating a series of active and participatory reactions in the spectator. This latter effect is an integral part of the work, since movement causes a substantial change in the perception of the work itself, thus interacting with the visitor and the environment. Therefore, the bystander is called to fulfil a participatory role of completion, through his presence and his interaction with the space by means of his perceptual apparatus. In this way the work is renewed each time the observing subject changes: for each individual and every consequent movement, new cognitive experiences are reserved. For the most illustrious exponent of Optical Art, Victor Vasarely, the optical problem was not reducible to the mere representation of visual games. Rather it had to do with the understanding of man’s cognitive mechanisms. Visual stimulation, as well as in Linda Arts’ work, becomes an expedient to induce an epistemological order of experiences in the observer. In fact, the artist investigates the limits of human
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cognitive activity through the creation of pictorial universes. Her light wall installation are like windows on a different world where one can face and experience unexpected perceptual and chromatic effects, able to stimulate the whole retinal and psychic apparatus of the observer. »The stakes«, wrote Vasarely, »is no longer the heart, but the retina«. In fact, Linda Arts creates modular structures (Sol LeWitt) which develop from a serial repetition of geometric models. The manipulation and variability of geometric structures, sometimes elementary ones such as the square or the cube, are the minimal modular expression that underlies the concept of space in Western thought from the Renaissance up until the present. Historically the trompe l’oeil is the effect defining the optical deception in art, which starting from the 5th century BC has stimulated the artists who have ventured into the proposal of alternative and suggestive worlds. It is precisely during the Italian Renaissance, with the mathematical theorization of perspective, that this illusion makes its way through the arts up to the abstraction, the creation of alternative worlds disconnected from any naturalistic relationship. In Linda Arts’ work, any reference to the natural does not exist, neither in the conception of the works nor in the attribution of retrospective figurations in the titles. The entire creative and realisation process takes place at an intellectual level in the mind of the artist who creates hand painting with a meticulous execution methodology. This causes little irregularities on the canvas as experiments of optical vibration on the surface of the work, an abstract-geometric figuration enriched of more personality. The space, intended as a synonym for the third dimension, is the leit motif of all her artistic reflection that also thickens with the perception of spatial structures. The optical and cognitive stress, the slippage of visual planes, creates an unstable spatiality, which expands the times of perception by subtracting from a definitive impression. In fact, this introduces us into a purely psychological analytic field: that of Gestalt.
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The ability to perceive an object, therefore, must be traced in an organization presided by the system according to schemes appropriately selected and able to give shape to the perception. This sort of unconscious intellectual completion is at the base of the creative and realization process of the artist who, with its elusive and dynamic forms, obliges the observer to continuously change his point of view. Hence, the passage to a pure visibility approach (Konrad Fiedler, The assessment on figurative art works, 1876) regarding the analysis of the work is essential, because art overcomes the mimesis of reality for the fact that each of us perceives reality in different way from the others. There is a reality that lives outside artworks, and consequently the artist, at work, creates a new world as a fruit of his perceptions and his pictorial gesture. Linda Arts is therefore an artist able to combine the most intimate perceptual components at an intellectual and formal level in her visual-analytical art, allowing the observer to enter into these phantasmagorical spatialities; Renaissance cathedrals where the perspective space is produced by means of a rhythmic alternation of illusionistic geometric modules.
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reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. cit. Albert Einstein
In Evi Vingerling’s painting there is a pure »aesthetic enjoyment which is objectified enjoyment of ourselves. Enjoying aesthetically means enjoying ourselves in a sensory object different from us, identifying with it«. With these words, written by the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy (1908), it is possible to introduce the creative process of the Dutch artist who finds her own interest and satisfaction in the beauty of the world. Vingerling’s attention is often taken from the banality of everyday life, by everything that surrounds us, but which, due to particular empathic circumstances, finds interest in her, provoking positive and comfortable emotions. This epiphany of experiences take place in the mind
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of the artist who grasps that moment and memorises it either photographically or through rapid sketches that will only be re-elaborated later. This type of apperceptive activity is transposed by the artist to give life to a sense of freedom and pleasure, of »free self-activation«, also called »positive empathy« (Theodore Lipps, »Erkenntnisquellen. Einfühlung« in Leifaden der Psycologie, 1909). From this empathic process with the objects and the nature of the world around her, the artist starts an abstract process that sees her engaged in her studio where she recreates the moment of inspiration, translated according to her own aesthetic-pictorial syntax. The impulse to abstraction derives from her desire to isolate the single object,
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abstracting it in order to trace its primary form. In this way, Vingerling finds a place of peace, a refuge from the chaotic world. Therefore, natural environments become spaces of the imagination where one can observe and contemplate the details and fragments of the world whose authentic beauty is usually not grasped. The bulimia of images to which modern society is subjected leads man to a chronic inattention towards them, as Susan Sontag writes about the dominant tendency in the art of capitalist countries, »to eliminate, or at least to mitigate, the sensory and moral disgust. Much of modern art strives to lower the threshold of the terrible« (S. Sontag, On photography, 1978). Prolonged exposure to photographs leads to a de-realisation of the world, diminishing our experiences and therefore our ability to interact with it. Sontag continues: »the greatest consequence of photography is that it gives us the feeling of being able to have the whole world in our head, as an anthology of images. Collecting photographs is collecting the world«. In some ways this justifies the artistic process of photographic acquisition of pieces of the world as miniatures of a reality that Vingerling learns
and collects as if they were moments of life, to be grasped and held to herself. The photographic image is therefore a direct emanation of the real, a trace of a human experience that, in this specific case, is that of the artist, who recalls a life experience, an emotion on the canvas that is made up of continuously expanding details. These pictorial elements that dot the painting are like autonomous universes in continuous expansion, perceived in the traces left by the artist’s creative hand; the spontaneous progress born from her mind in a stream of consciousness that intuitively reproduces that instant of life caught in a photographic detail or sketch. The gaze of the observer is disoriented by not recognising any naturalistic reference, since the artist hides the subject through colours that are completely detached from the reality. Even the negation of a title is the affirmation of a desire to synthesise the image and convey all the attention of the observer on sensations, on purely aesthetics and empathy. The empathic connection that the artist creates between her work and the external world, the spatiality that
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stands between these two elements, is filled with emotions in the approach to the organic form, not to reproduce the plausible image on the canvas or in the observer’s mind but rather as an attempt to bring back the happiness deriving from the beauty of that specific moment in which the artist perceived it. At that moment, held back and later reproduced on the canvas, Seeing, in Latin v-id-ere, retains the Greek root of the word idea -id. This definition of the word videre illustrates how Evi Vingerling is able to obtain a mental representation through the vision, a cognitive capacity inherent in her and consequently in her works. She is able to give life to pictorial fantasies realised with episteme. It is through a reasoning and an artistic intuition that she expresses herself pictorially with whimsical and smooth colours.
Vingerling then gives rise to a sensorial perception typical of the cognitive act of seeing, since the view was strictly linked to the idea. The representation of something real, therefore, exists not only in a correct adaptation between the image and the object represented but in enjoying the organic form in itself, whose psychic assumption is enclosed in empathy. Thus Evi Vingerling introduces us into her apperceptive world, consisting of observations of the real of which she maintains the capacity of analysis, establishing an aesthetic and synchronic relationship with it that returns to the public in the form of her abstract paintings.
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a change in essence and form is required. the overcoming of painting, sculpture, poetry and music is required. [...] by invoking this change in the nature of man, [...] we abandon the practice of known art forms, we approach the development of an art based on the unity of time and space. Lucio Fontana, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946.
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In the pictorial art of Marije Gertenbach, the research of space, the overcoming of the physical limits of painting, is the essential base from which her artistic inquiry starts. The Dutch artist constantly pursues the desire to trespass the pre-established limits of the canvas in order to access an enlarged dimension on which to operate and thus be able to interact with a dilated space more closely linked to reality. Gertenbach sees space as a concept which is embedded in a socio-cultural context, perceivable through the artistic expression of that period.
Starting from Dürer’s definition, »Item Perspectiva ist ein lateinisch Wort, bedeutet ein Durchsehen«, perspectiva is a Latin word that means to look through, as Erwin Panofsky did in Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), it is possible to analyse the concept of space from classical era to the modern age. The essay demonstrates how artists in the past have represented spatiality according to their contemporary conception of spatiality and their surrounding world.
This is a concept which features the artistic research of Gertenbach who has always been fascinated by mural painting, where pictorial spatiality is best expressed and the narrative cycle becomes the expression of an era, of the cultural Weltanschauung of a given period. On her trip to Italy, Gertenbach was attracted by Giotto’s art and his pictorial cycles on the Life of St. Francis (Upper Church, Assisi, 1292-1296) and on the The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and The Life of Christ (Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, 1303-1305). These artworks include all the scientific evolutions of the perspective-spatial representation system as well as the symbolic forms of a conception embedded into the culture of that time. In these spaces circumscribed by the paintings, it is possible to experiment with the eyes and the mind of Giotto’s aesthetics, which marks the spaces and the narrative registers with masterfully executed skill and creative ideas. We are faced with a completely innovative mastery which Gertenbach resumes in her pictorial installations where she tries to recreate that sense of estrangement from the real, in order to introduce us into a private sensorial and emotional dimension, the same that the people of that time experienced and, in particular, the »illiterates« of Gregory the Great in contemplating Giotto’s Lives.
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Moreover, Gertenbach is intrigued by how we usually enjoy the wall decorations in contemporary times: they are often detached from their original spaces for conservative reasons to be kept in museums, hence in completely different contexts with respect to their original destination. This process of estrangement is of interest for her artistic research as detaching the picture from its frame and preserving it allows us, to recognise and attribute an eternal value to the creative gesture. The artist also shows a marked interest in the private spaces, as well as the pictorial motifs of the popes from the Renaissance period, more specifically how their function and meaning has changed over the centuries. Starting from the reading of the book by Leny Louise Waarts, Badkamers voor pausen en prelaten [Bath rooms for Popes and Prelates, ed] (2014), Gertenbach as a painter, is interested in the a priori consideration of human presence, of the physical and interpretative interaction of such decorations and spaces, and its cultural evolution. The taste for the recovery of the Ancient was a fundamental component in the Renaissance that spread out both in aspects of costume and in the artistic field,
with the involvement of the school of Raffaello in the grotesque decoration of the Cardinal Bibbiena’s Stove in the Vatican Palaces (1516) and of the Bathhouse of Clemente VII (1525). These ornaments do not just have an explicitly decorative but also a therapeutic function according to the medical theories of the era in which the vision of certain subjects was recommended to prepare the observer for a consequent well-being. The personal physician of Pope Urban VIII, Giulio Mancini formulated a treatise, Considerazioni sulla pittura [Thoughts on painting, ed] (1617-1621), dedicating the second part to these themes. All this demonstrates that there is no contrast between ancient spatiality and Renaissance spatiality: in ancient era there was an idea of finite, non-homogeneous space, in relation to spatial physiological perception, whereas in the modern world it is based on mathematicalgeometrical principles, where the space is infinite, homogeneous and therefore systematic. With Panofsky we come to define a thesis that confers a contiguous and harmonious evolution of the spirit to the idea of the evolution of space, just as Gertenbach shows us with her work in perennial historical evolution.
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Marije Gertenbach overcomes the two-dimensionality of the painting, creating installations of coloured canvas that occupy the physical context. The space is absorbed by the painting, which, in its spreading into the environment, also changes the exhibition concept, no longer framed canvas hanging on the walls, but coloured walls and floating canvas where the audience can move around the exhibition space. Her artistic proposals burst into space, unhinging the traditional rules of painting to directly involve the viewer. The expressive freedom of the artist acts on the viewer generating different moods and totally involving the audience in the scenario created by her. The work of art is therefore actively experimented, experienced in first person through a real sensory involvement. The architecture of removable and readable canvases shows the ephemeral character of art as well as of life itself.
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Published by SEA Foundation on the occasion of the exhibition, Beyond the Painting. Text // Valeria Ceregini Editors // Marijn Dekker and Tamara Derksen Graphic Design // www.jens-standke.de Print // HABE Tilburg SEA Foundation board // Jan Willem van Rijnberk (chair), Riet van Gerven (coordinator/curator) and Martje Ingenhoven Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked inadvertently, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Any copy of this book issued by the publishers is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including these words being imposed on a subsequent publisher. All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, now known or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978-90-826841-3-1 SEA Foundation Tivolistraat 22 | Tilburg | The Netherlands www.seafoundation.eu The illustrations in this book have been reproduced courtesy of the following copyright holders: © Linda Arts; © Marije Gertenbach; © Bettie van Haaster; © José Heerkens; © Evi Vingerling; © Albada Jelgersma Gallery, Amsterdam; © Dudokdegroot Gallery, Amsterdam; © Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery, Amsterdam. Supported by Provincie Noord Brabant, BKKC and Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Amsterdam
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