Marcelle Hanselaar

Marcelle Hanselaar: back to front face

It's strange how you miss out on certain artists, especially ones that have been making wonderful images for years and that have been shown regularly. Marcelle Hanselaar is one of those artists I have somehow missed and shouldn't have. She has long been making consistently powerful images and at times they are almost too visceral to look at. She unflinchingly takes on the horrors perpetuated by a patriarchal society, her metaphors sting, but help to clean out the stalls at the same time. She is still working and showing and if you get a chance to see her work in the flesh, go and see it, it is etched into being both metaphorically and literally.

Getting ready

Le Retour Futile 5, 2021, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 cm

It is her ability to get the most out of simple things that I really like. For instance 'Back to front face' is a really basic idea but done with panache and conviction. 'Getting ready' is again a pretty straightforward image that is given a twist by the fingers cutting into the hair as if they are some sort of agricultural equipment, the three straps of her dress awkwardly echoing the four finger divided hair lengths. But why the strange shadow/lighting drama?The single eye looking back at us suggests this woman is getting ready for something more sinister than a party. 'Le Retour Futile' is simply poetic, a restricted colour palette and paired down image that is mysteriously romantic. 

Scar

Scar is a deceptively simple painting, by paring the image down to the pink line of the scar, she makes something far more intriguing than perhaps it ought to be. I look at it and I'm thinking about painting and the work of those non figurative painters like Barnett Newman who's zips now begin to feel much more embodied things. The flatness debate around painting is transcended into something about wounds and backbones and how close to the surface and yet hidden pain can be. We stand with our faces to the wall too as we gaze at the back of the woman, our heads, like hers, close to a surface that we introspectively inspect.

 

Her etchings are perhaps what she is most well known for. They deal with drama and action in a very direct way, often celebrating the role that women can take in fighting back and taking control of situations that have often been dominated by aggressive men.

The crying game

Now that Paula Rego has died perhaps we will see more of Marcelle Hanselaar, a Dutch artist living in London rather than a Portuguese one. Like Rego, Hanselaar can tap into mythic layers of that strange thing that we call life. Rego has for many years occupied the territory so well, that for one reason or another other similar artists have been overshadowed. I will be posting a tribute to Rego and her work in the near future, and was reminded how good she was both by visiting her  exhibition at Victoria Miro last year and seeing her contribution to this year's Venice Biennale. 

Paula Rego: Gluttony 

I'll leave you therefore with an image of Rego's work from Venice. A timely reminder of how good she was. I believe that the gravitas of her imagery was partly due to the making of models to work from. The strangeness of reality can be translated much more powerfully if you have something about your work that grounds it in that very reality that you find strange. Like Paula Rego, Marcelle Hanselaar has that ability and now that I have discovered her work I shall make sure I keep a look out for it in future. 

See also:

Recent paintings at Aleph Contemporary

https://marcellehanselaar.com/

Drawing in colour

Paula Rego’s ‘Dancing Ostriches’

Drawing and printmaking

Léon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy

Léon Spilliaert's work is on exhibition at the Royal Academy until the 20th of September. This is an artist few of you will be aware of because it is only recently that critical opinion has shifted in his direction and work that was considered very inferior Ensor type imagery, is now celebrated as work that captured a certain type of mental anguish that existed at the time. Perhaps it's due to our own day's preoccupation with the mental pressures of being locked down and being constantly made aware of the invisible dangers of virus attacks, that has made critics re-visit Spilliaert's images and now see them as important.

Again we have a story of a once thought of poor or unimportant artist's work, being elevated into the parthenon of great art. On the one hand we all benefit by now being able to see his work, but on the other hand it makes me very cynical, as it is hard to resist thinking about the capitalist machinery behind all this reappraisal. Who will benefit from the sudden rise in auction prices and will any of the many struggling artists throughout the world gain anything from his travel from obscurity to fame, beyond a feeling of "well perhaps maybe"...?

The work is though interesting and it reminded me of Munch more than Ensor. The moody threat that lies behind certain types of image abstraction was I thought very potent. As we select out or abstract things from the world in order to envisage it, we are left with the things that reflect our own proclivities, in this case Spilliaert was obviously always aware of the threat that lies in dark pools of shadow, a half seen thing or a sinuous shape. All of which are things that we can flesh out through drawing and it is a certain type of reductionist drawing that lies at the root of his image making.

The image above of a bed covered in a white sheet could be a simple study in tone, but of course the white shape can also become a ghost like figure, we read the empty space as absence, and we are presented with a sparse composition that makes us think that someone has just died.

Spilliaert drew a lot when a child and we still have his sketchbooks.

Sketchbooks always help us to see how an artist thinks and in Spilliaert's early work you can see a certain morbid fascination coming through very early on; perhaps he was a sickly child.

For myself, I am mainly interested in the way that he can animate inanimate objects by drawing them in such a way that there is a certain ambiguity about their representation. 

The pair of gloves above could be anything from jellyfish to old people, they morph between one form and another, which I can see from Spilliaert's point of view made them slightly sinister; however I like the humour and playful possibilities suggested in the way these gloves are always on the edge of dissolving and becoming something else. I mentioned Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman' recently as an alternative type of drawing theory and this is another image that I think fits into O'Brien's comedic model.

See also:

Drawing water (includes an extract from the Third Policeman)

The Royal Academy details of the exhibition

Drawing hands

Pop expressionist surrealism

Daniel Martin Diaz

Coming from a generation of artists that grew up with Modernism it is still sometimes hard to accept the world of post-post Modernism. I become more and more aware of new/old art movements, forged out of different combinations of what has gone before. Minimalist Expressionism, Conceptual Pop, Post Industrial Pointalism, New Abstract Symbolists and in this case Pop Expressionist Surrealism. Every movement comes with a pre-packaged history, in this case everything from Bruegel and Bosch to Warhol and Basquiat.  
For me this is the ultimate in consumer culture, a sort of pick and mix shop, whereby you simply put various ingredients together and there you have it, whether this is an exotic smoothie or a new painting. I ought to hate it, I was brought up to look for authenticity and the hard won image, but it now feels to me that this type of work is in fact more reflective of where we culturally are than any other. If art is to be seen as a commodity then it ought to be made in the same way all other commodities are. In a time of maximum consumer choice, the more a consumer can pick and mix the various elements (in this case the artist is him or herself the consumer as well) the better.  When I look at this sort of work I also feel the awful weight of dense theoretical contexts lifted and art making revealed for what it is, a type of shameless enjoyment and entertainment. No more and no less. 

Gary Panter

However within the mix of the artists that are seen as belonging to this new Pop expressionist surrealism movement are some of the people that I have followed for several years and I have seen these artists as people that have developed 'hard won' imagery and have a unique take on the world. It may just be that what is happening is that the worlds of 'popular' or as it used to be termed 'low' culture and 'high' or 'elite' culture have now become totally mixed. All cultures are both popular and unique to whoever engages with them. When I talk to people about music, they seem to enjoy the Beatles as much as Beethoven, and Steve Reich as much as Dizzee Rascal. 
The individual is now the key mover. You don't need to be qualified to make choices, lists of the best music, art, films etc. pervade the web, it seems that everyone is happy to let others know of their choices for these things, and then they just need to validate those choices by getting others to 'like' them. However we tend to 'like' what we already know, or which confirms our world view. Trust our instincts or rely on reason? I get the sense that we are moving into a time of making decisions based on emotional gut reaction, whether this is good or bad will remain to be seen, whatever the outcome the old order of Modernism has gone and the codes of aesthetic measurement that went alongside it are now outdated as well. New codes, ones that acknowledge plagiarism and appropriation over authenticity and formal invention will need to be learnt. But learnt by who? I suspect if you think you need to think about these things you are already 'past it'. Academia rages about plagiarism but people sitting on computers and fingering their mobiles world wide simply cut and paste and get on with their lives. 

Here is a nice easy primer/manifesto for Pop expressionist surrealism.

See also:

Fuseli Strange forms of hair

Unica Zurn

The continuing influence of surrealism

Anthony Earnshaw