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Text Catalogue Rineke Marsman 'Retrace', Gallery Witteveen, februari 2003
RETRACE
by Jonieke van Es
Children are central in the paintings of Rineke Marsman; they form the principal motif in her work.. Often only one figure is pictured, of which only the head is represented filling the picture plane. Sometimes, too, a child is painted full-length, or a group of children is the subject of a painting; adults are featured only very rarely. The children present themselves in a special way. They are drawn in fine lines and then painted over with many layers of transparent paint (as if it were not oil paint but water colour). This gives them a rarefied presence: they are no longer beings of flesh and blood, but rather apparitions incorporeal and ephemeral. The fact that the artist has literally painted a film over many of these portraits - a last semitransparent layer, sometimes washed, sometimes painted in streaks - reinforces that suggestion.
Rineke Marsman borrows the position and 'presentation' of the children from photographs, an important source of inspiration for her work. The photographic origin of the image can be traced in her paintings from the fact that the children's heads are often positioned in the plane as in passport photographs. And also when the children are portrayed full-length, individually or as a group, position and composition follow the conventions, of (group) portrait photography. The paintings themselves, however, are not children's portraits at all; they are paintings from children's portraits. For although Rineke Marsman usually pictures the children of the photographs more than life-size in her paintings (which makes them come very close), the feeling of being tangible and lifelike that a photograph produces - the sensation of 'that's the way it was' - has been filtered away in her paintings. There the children are present rather as in a dream. Little remains of the neutrality of the photograph - the equivalent presentation of all constituent parts, whether it is a look, the line of a jaw or a collar - and it is striking that each time the fare ha- been 'painted over', hidden, the most. It makes the 'protrait' less recognisable, more anonymous. This is further reinforced by the fact that the children in the painting have no name : Rineke Marsman does not giev her works separate titles, at the most she indicates a group of works with a similar title.
This is the case in 'Le Memorial des Enfants ('the Memorial Book of Children'), a series op painings on which Rineke Marsman worked from 1996 onwards and which was concluded in 1999 with a presentation - her first exhibition in a museum - in the Van Reekum Museum in Apeldoorn. (1) The immediate cause of painting children was a monumental book that was published in France in 1995: Le memorial des enfants juifs déporté de France. This book lists all Jewish children - often accompanied by photographs - who were deported from France to the German concentration camps in World War II. And although the works originating from it are also intended as a tribute - an homage both to the Jewish children and to Serge Klarsfeld, the editor of the book - their significance extends well beyond just that. While the artist painted, the subject broadened itself and was given a different, more personal interpretation. In an interview Rineke Marsman put it like this: "Of course it started with the emotion you experience when you learn about all those children who have disappeared. But gradually it acquired a sort of stratification, it became more a kind of journey through time and space that I made myself. The Jewish aspect lost its prominent place in the story; my own memories are also part of it now."' (2)
Children disappear. In the case of the Jewish children in World War II in a dramatic and gruesome way, but also when children's lives are not literally broken, they 'disappear': in the natural and irrevocable process of growing up and becoming adults. This disappearance in the metaphorical sense seems to be the real subject of Marsman's paintings, and it is striking that in her images childhood and adulthood often touch one another. The children she paints give the impression of having become `adults' prematurely (as children in photographs often seem to be older than they really are): their expressions are serious and sometimes even oldish - and it is only the large heads above slender bodies that betray their age. This may be one of the reasons for Marsman's fascination with photographs from the nineteen thirties: it is the time of children in neat dresses and suits, with collars and lace, with smoothly combed or neatly cut hair, sometimes tied in an enormous bow. But although 'Le memorial' can still be found in her studio, the book is no longer Rineke Marsman's only source. There are now also children from other periods and cultures: missing children, street urchins, and children engaged in child labor. Here again they are always children with whom 'there is something the matter': they grew up in difficult circumstances, they are not sweet and `blank', but they show a personality of their own. In her paintings Rineke Marsman does not glorify youth and being young, but she shows no pity or compassion either: her children are too strong and vital for that. They often appear remarkably militant, and in combination with an awareness of their vulnerability, this gives the images a strange poetry.
Although children are also prominently present in the paintings which were created after the exhibition in the Van Reekum Museum, there is more place and space in these - both literally and figuratively - for other elements. There is less focus on the child. A good example of this is a long-drawn-out horizontal painting consisting of three separate canvases. The largest, central canvas shows a windswept landscape. Over this, or rather, through this, a long-drawn-out, box-like interior space opens up, the rear wall of which brightens momentarily as a whitish plane. Landscape and space have an equivalent presence; the image is double, as if two films have been placed on top of each other. The landscape, painted with clearly visible strokes of the brush in dark green and blue, appears desolate and deserted, and the room - positioned asymmetrically in the image, with depth lines which have a strong three-dimensional effect - is bare and empty as well. The central canvas is flanked by two boys: the one on the left is seen frontally, the one on the right in three-quarter face. Of both boys, probably about ten years old, only their heads are shown, which are placed large and frame-filling in the plane - their proximity alone contrasts with the distance and space evoked by the landscape and the room. And at the same time the suggestion of distance is here too: it seems as if the faces, with a sad expression, are seen through a film of fluid. Transparently painted in shades of grey and blue, the `portraits' seem volatile and immaterial.
What is fascinating about the painting is that the various elements - landscape, room and boys - are separate, and yet have been joined together to form a convincing image, although it's meaning is not entirely clear. The fact that the work is experienced as a unity, is mainly due to the almost classical composition of three canvases together. The composition of the centrepiece and the sidepanels is strictly symmetrical - as if it were a modern altarpiece - and the dynamics of the middle canvas is reinforced by the 'portraits': the glance of the boy on the right leads to the room and emphasizes the depth lines on the right, whereas the frontal position of the boy on the left stresses the closure of the room on the left side.
The transparency and stratification in the way the landscape, the room and the boys have been painted, contrast with a row of four little dots on each of the portraits, bright red on the right, clear blue on the left. These painted dots have a disturbing effect in the sense that they contradict the illusionist nature of the boys' faces. They emphasize the plane and they seem to be intended - not in the least because of their striking colours - as a signal, a way to put into perspective the naturalism of the paintings which may be too misleading. They are dissonant elements which increase the tension within the image and thus reinforce it.
This painting is part of a new series of works which Rineke Marsman has given the title of Retrace. This title - in the meaning of 'searching' and 'retrieving'- is closely connected with Le memorial des enfants, and also with the title of Marsman's 1992 graduation presentation: Sporen (Traces). The element of remembering, recalling - by painting - things that existed in the past, remains a noticeable constant factor in her work.
Many of Marsman's recent paintings are composed of various canvases, combining quite varied images. A number of recently completed works, for example, have beds in them which have been placed as spatial elements in otherwise empty rooms. For Rineke Marsman they have a direct relation with the children: the bed as a metaphor for the child's own place, where it finds shelter and safety. But at the same time the coffin-like character of the beds as Marsman paints them gives the images a grisly air and conjures up associations with death (an effect, incidentally, not intended by the artist). Different in character are the canvases with abstract patterns, such as circles, undulating lines and screens which she 'incorporates' in her paintings. Whereas the bed is an element which creates the illusion of a three-dimensional object, the often decorativelooking patterns emphasize the very flatness of. the surface.
But just like the beds these canvases are not without meaning: sometimes they have sweet and soft colours (such as the circles in the background of the painting with a shadowy, standing girl), sometimes they are hard and shrill (such as the canvas woth purple-blue circles, which isnpart of a work with three boys in red-brown hues - this mismatch of colours gives the work the character of an indictment). The fact that pictorial elements occupy a more central position indicates that, more than in the earlier paintings, painting itself is becoming a theme in the artist's recent work. In the search for a balance between subject and execution, both aspects now seem to be better matched. Rineke Marsman's latest paintings may be regarded as an investigation into. the various possibilities of paint and brush, into the paradox of the suggestion of threedimensional representation and the reality of the flat plane; with regard to the subject she selects extremes, which are joined together into an intriguing whole.
(1) See Exhibiton catalogue 'Le Memorial des Enfants Rineke Marsman Paintings 1996 -1999', Apeldoorn (Van Reekum Museum) 1999, with texts by Frits Bless and Marlou Wolfs.
(2) René de Cocq, 'Portraits with a new truth. Rineke Marsman's paintings of lost children in the Van Reekum Museum, Apeldoornse Courant, 25 February 1999. |
