The exhibition
'painted image limited' brings together
the work of ten artists engaged directly as well as loosely within
the activity of painting. The themes involved within the works
presented are diverse. However, there is a core sensibility involving
the nature of the body, which has variously been represented with
paint: as a container being enveloped by a skin, paint as that skin,
paint literally on the skin, paint removed by the body and thus
imprinting the image of the body, and finally in the classical manner
of paint depicting an illusion of the body. Among the participants that provide an interpretation are Karin Bos, Lilian Eliëns, Monika Sosnowska, Chantal Spit, Clary Stolte, Kim Streur, Brigitte Topman, Naomi Warmer and Monika Zarzeczna.
The materiality
of paint enables some of these artists in their work. In
Kim
Streur's Amazon painting there are two
conspiring elements, which instruct the viewer. Firstly, the image is
formed by absorbing the paint into a bodysuit worn by the artist, who
lies directly onto the canvas. This is the opposite of using a naked
girl as a rubberstamp as in Yves Klein's happenings. Streur leaves a
negative bodyprint in the monochromatic field of the painting, which
can be modified as an image using solvents among other techniques.
The image is the second important element, which shows an almost
classical frieze, such as those on the sides of the Acropolis. There
are three figures, whose bodies are formed from the artist's own.
They are modified into Amazonian archers; they are clones of each
other, repeating into a patern.
Clary
Stolte's small untitled canvasses hung
modestly around the space; they sit stoically as if neglected. Our
first impression is of some minimal painter, who makes ugly paintings
without the respect of painterlyness or the tradition of paintings
from sensibility of minimal artists, such as Robert Ryman. We are
right in this assumption, because as it turns out Stolte's paintings
use odd substances, such as the creams used to soothe medical
conditions, such as piles. We can not be aware of this as viewers;
however, this knowledge transforms the meaning of the work, because
the canvas is as a human skin and the paint is almost treatment for
these ailing works.
The figure is used throughout the show.
The treatment of the figure varies greatly; from say
Naomi
Warmer's [1970, Haarlem NL] transformed
fashion magazine clippings - girly faces and amputated arms, which
are embedded between visceral dispersions of resin based substances
and the plastic sheets on which the photo image has been copied on -
to the more conventionally painted, but nevertheless disturbing work
of Chantal Spit
[1971,
Losser NL]. She places a little girl
standing on a railway track; evoking metaphorically the vulnerability
of youth? And the immanence of disaster or at least radical
transformation. The girl is depicted in a party dress. This seems
nostalgic, but heightens her innocense and therefore the drama of the
impending disaster. The body as a theme re-emerges in the intallation
work of
Monika
Sosnowska [1972,
Ryki PL] , whose upturned bath with its
pregnancy of the form, reminds of the cadaver of a beached whale.
Perhaps the second element of the installation, which is a fish
painted into the interior of a wooden box, secures for us this
aquatic interpretation. This work is illusive to interpretation and
attempts a poetic association between elements; it is surrealistic
and playful. In the end, despite all this, there is a plaintive
sadness.
Other artists in the exhibition demonstrated the
theme of the body. The opening of the exhibition was adorned by real
models, painted by Monique Schaefer. This Body Art-event brought to
the show an element of carnival, which was playfully sexy. By
contrast
Lilian
Eliëns' [1967, Heerlen NL] painting of a
masked and erotically dressed female figure with deformed stiletto
heels, mimics the fashion world. This figure seems to be passively
bound by the clothing; the viewer is asked to contemplate the
sexuality of this figure. The mask and the acidity of the
paintingstyle give clues to the pathos of the work. This work hangs
on an edge between celebration and critique. It instructs us to make
our own minds up. The participants in
'painted
image limited' are all female. To a large
extent they are all painters, but all use material and its inherent
qualities to express a condition. Some of the work may have a
feminist agenda, but more importantly all of the work is indivisibly
humanistic.
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