Bathing Dining Garden Father Daughters Beach Bed
Bathing Dining Garden Father
Daughters Beach Bed
Maaike Schoorel’s Shadow Play
Maaike Schoorel paints by touch, slowly scanning the surface. Only here and there is a note taken of something that deserves to be recorded. What she paints is a reduced field of vision, but it is one that sharpens the eye.‘T Was nacht, ’t was nacht, ’t was midden in de nacht, toen hoorden zij een vreselijk gelach. ’This is the sound of a high, shrill female voice on the Robotics With Strings CD, by the London artists’ band, 7 Stamina 12. ‘Het waren 7 vlooien, 3 witte en 4 rooien. De rooien waren 7 meter lang en hadden vaders onderbroekje aan en een jas met gouden knopen die wilden zij verkopen. Aan Wie? Aan Wie? Aan koning Willem III!’ It is the Dutch artist Maaike Schoorel who speaks, screams or sings the text. When I visited her in London, where she has lived for some time now, she hands me the CD as soon as I walk in. ‘I sing in the band, but it is not the way vocals usually relate to the instruments. I am an instrument myself. Sometimes I speak, sometimes, for five minutes, I am silent.’The cheerful text of Koning Willem III resembles the title of the retrospective exhibition of Maaike Schoorel’s work held last April and May at the Maureen Paley Gallery in London: Bathing dining garden father beach bed. A simple, factual summing-up of everyday subjects. it almost sounds like a poem by someone casually looking at their life and simply noting what he or she does. Other titles of her paintings are also evidence of this preference for apparently trivial subjects: Birthday, Balcony, Spa Still Life, Holiday, Cruise, The Visit and Coffee Table. So too is Picnic. The starting point for this large painting from 2004 is a snapshot of the kind of picnic that you come across on a summer’s day in any park. A group of friends sitting on the grass with a couple of bottles of wine and food – it is a pleasant, summery, light-hearted, almost pastoral subject. But there is something gnawing away at Schoorel’s painted representation, literally. The painting is very lightly applied, like a watercolour – although it is not, because it is unmistakably an oil painting – and like a watercolour, it is made up of light stains, but also of holes, empty patches. Here is the shoulder of a jacket, there a piece of a bag set on the ground, somewhere else the contour of a bottle.… But the picture is equally defined by what is missing, what has not been filled in. The figures consequently seem like fragile apparitions, pale ghosts of themselves. Each time you think you understand the painting and begin to focus on the cheerful connotations that Schoorel is clearly capable of creating, the holes and the fragility of the whole generate a sense of melancholy. Is it all really as lovely as what I think I am seeing? The tragic atmosphere of the painting is reminiscent of the film Bubble by the American director, Steven Soderbergh, which portrays three men from a hamlet in Ohio, whose lives consist of boring jobs in a dead-end, monotonous existence. I told Schoorel about the film and about the impression it made, because of the way it conflicts with our idea of a happy and exiting life, to which she answered, ‘Picnic may be indirectly about being together and the issue of where we belong, but that whole question also has something melancholy about it, something that is always there, just under the surface.’
Shadow Subjects
Maaike Schoorel’s work is veiled, muffled. In contrast to the desolate realism of Soderbergh’s work, she very literally employs emptiness as a visual element. ‘The images in our contemporary visual culture have come to look very much alike. Our ability to distinguish them seems to be growing less and less important. When I was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, I began thinking about how I would like to change that, about where I saw real progress or something new. I began by combining different things and juxtaposing them, such as objects alongside drawings, so that I could take something apart and build it up again. At a certain point, I began painting more and more. Illustrations from glossy magazines were my starting point, because in them, I saw the ‘equal treatment’, that visual democracy, in which everything has the same importance. It was a literal translation, within which I went in search of differences. I investigated how you expressed the fact that, for example, jeans feel different than a bottle of cola. In a world where the transformation of objects into commodities gives everything a friction-free surface, I found it important to pay attention to the differences in the nuances of texture. That, to me, is one of the most important things that artists can communicate, that through the emptiness, the absence and the loss of things, you can in fact again see new connections.’In the meantime, Maaike Schoorel no longer uses magazine photographs as a point of departure, but family photographs. They are the perfectly ordinary clan snapshots with which everyone is familiar. In her studio, she shows me a holiday snapshot of a friend standing between her mother and two sisters. The women are wearing flowered dresses. In the background, lilacs are in bloom. ‘At a certain point, I asked myself, what is it actually about – that question about how you want to relate to the world? The gloss that is laid over reality, over how you see things, or that people project when they look at things, is also in my own environment. So I started painting my friends, and then my parents, who had just retired. I discovered that you could also find a broad perspective by using subjects from your own social context. If you know someone, it is sometimes easier to capture the essence of how a shirt falls or to catch a typical gesture. But I have also made paintings of people I don’t even know. In the end, it is more about painting and finding archetypal images. They often still have personal origins, but that is not the central issue, and the viewer does not need to know that. Everyone now has personal references for the kinds of images that I create, and because my work is fairly abstract, I find that this is precisely what is important. It is more about a mental idea. If you are talking about “shadow subjects”, it may seem banal to select a holiday snapshot out of the whole arsenal of images that are available to us. But for me, “nearby experiences” are this kind of experience. This is my life.’
Hints of Colour
The Picnic (2004) has become a significant work in Maaike Schoorel’s painterly oeuvre. It beckons from the websites of the galleries that represent her: Maureen Paley in London and Diana Stigter in Amsterdam, as well as on the site of London’s Saatchi Gallery, where her work will be included in one of their Triumph of Painting series. In subtle fashion, Picnic refers to the history of painting, in which the picnic has not infrequently served as a significant motif. Such ‘hints’ at such traditional painting genres as the portrait, the still life, the landscape or bathers can moreover be found in all her work. Nonetheless, Maaike Schoorel emphasizes that she does not want to be affiliated simply and exclusively with painting. ‘I am aware that as a painter, I am involved in the history and the context of the medium, but I also want to divorce myself from all that. It is about painting, but at the same time, it’s not about painting at all.’Where in Schoorel’s earlier work, despite those consciously blank spaces, there were clearly recognizable representations, this is no longer the case in her new work. These paintings are so subtle, so multi-layered and minimal in the way they are set up that they can no longer even be reproduced. They therefore literally remove themselves from the ‘the age of technical reproducibility’. Anyone hoping to use a Google search to familiarize themselves with Maaike Schoorel’s recent work will not get very far. With this work, Schoorel not only shoots holes in the picture, but she also shoots holes in the barrage of digital images and reproductions of works of art, which has become such an important part of the way art is perceived. When we look through the wide-angle transparencies and slides of her work to trace its development, she tells me which photographs served as starting points for which painting, but I fail to see the connection. There are three canvasses hanging on the wall in her studio, two empty, with just the sized canvas, and one at a ‘well-advanced stage’, which she is working on for her exhibition at the Van Loon Museum in Amsterdam. Only when my eyes have grown accustomed to the light in the studio do I slowly perceive the colours swimming out to me, an image unravelling itself from the white surface. ‘My paintings have become more extreme, in the sense that at first glance, it looks like there is less to see on the canvas. Nonetheless, I spend much longer on them than I used to, and there is much more paint. I used to work with a single layer of blue. Now the paint is thinned with turpentine and applied in four or five layers, so that the colour very slowly reaches out to you. When you walk into the gallery, your eyes have to get used to the white. At first, all you see is a kind of voile. At first, you think there is very little colour in them, but when you look, you discover more and more subtleties and nuances, as you experience the different colour spaces. In my most recent work, the actual presentation is no longer recognizable, but the viewer does feel that he or she is looking at something familiar. That recognition is more or less intuitive, and because of that, it is more about how you look at things. Is what you are seeing a glass, its contents or the light reflected on it? It is more about the space in between, instead of the representation.’ When I ask if this process of reduction was something that came about gradually, she answers, ‘Yes. It is not something you think up, not, “…now I want to say as much as possible with as little as possible.” You can only analyze a process like that up to a certain point. It evolved out of necessity, in the course of searching for a means of saying something in a certain way. It is about leaving things out, but it is not just a process of reduction. I play with the phenomenon of reduction, but at the same time, I also believe in a new image that stands in its own time, and in that sense, is no longer about the loss.’
Meditative Images
Given Maaike Schoorel’s earlier paintings of eaten-away portraits and still lifes of almost poetic beauty, with that gaping emptiness creeping up from behind, her recent work is more meditative. We only see something when we have emptied our minds and released our desire for meaning. It is far easier just to casually walk past them. ‘Seeing’ something requires time and attention. A press release from the Maureen Paley Gallery states, ‘…it would be a mistake to read the artist’s work as a memorial to a distant past. While her marks appear minimal, they have a precision, a robust structural relationship to each other, which makes them belong to a permanent now.’ During our visit, Maaike Schoorel adds, ‘In the last few years, there has been a lot of discussion about the role of the viewer in how a work of art is perceived, but painting is hardly even considered in that debate. That is rather surprising, because in painting, I find the role of the viewer is just as important as it is for any other medium.’ In Maaike Schoorel’s recent work, the role of the viewer (also evidenced in the larger formats of her paintings) has become more central than ever before. Schoorel’s ambition in activating her viewers makes me think of the work and ideas of the German art historian, Hans Belting, who has published a great deal about the relationship between media and image. According to Belting, a medium is essentially the carrier of an image, and the image can only exist because it is embodied by a medium and because we observe or perceive it. Images do not exist; ‘they happen’.1 You could say that in the ‘disrobing’ of her images, Schoorel is in search of the core of what Belting has described as the ‘animation of images’. Schoorel begins with everyday reality, from there takes a (banal) photographed representation of reality, which is conditioned by man, and changes it into an abstracted, painterly representation on canvas, in which only the rudiments of this photographic reality have applied themselves in the form of thin, non-recognizable layers. It is up to the viewer to create the image (Belting speaks in terms of das Bild, in which both the external ‘image’ and the inner or underlying image are expressed). Working at the very edge of nothing at all is no easy challenge. ‘At first, I really thought I was being self-destructive by creating work that could not be reproduced, or only barely, and which because of that, was difficult to classify,’ she sighs. She found the assurance and confidence to continue in music. ‘Music is a composition that comes together in space, and being engaged in music helps me in my painting. In the world of music, different questions are asked, and that gives me the space to allow myself a new kind of freedom.’ There is still the question of how far Maaike Schoorel can go with this process of image reduction, of how little the brain in fact requires in order to make associations, of exactly where it stops dead. To that question, there is in fact no answer. Work by Maaike Schoorel can be seen at the following locations:Just In Time: Gemeentelijke Kunstaankopen, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam1 December 2006-11 March 2007Le Nouveau Siécle, Museum van Loon, Amsterdam 4 November 2006-15 Januari 2007‘Skill 7 Stamina 12’ will be playing at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, SMCS, in March, 2007.
Ingrid Commandeur
