Fall Season Opening
08 September - 23 October
Stephanie Gude, Tinca Veerman, Daleen Bloemers, Una Gildea, Patricia Werneck Ribas
STEPHANIE GUDE’s paintings show us a glimpse into the lives of her subjects. By sharing her work Gude confides in us this special artist-model relationship, and in doing so hopes to reveal naked truths about the world in which we all live. Gude uses color expressively, and works intuitively and diligently to see her subjects, hear them, feel them, and try to understand them. In the long but few minutes she spends with her models she even loves them. Her revelatory and sensitive paintings emote this intimate and visceral connection through the magic of paint on paper.
TINCA VEERMAN loves the words of Aristotle: ‘the soul never thinks without an image’. First we see, then we think. When you look at an image, all these visual experiences over time make up your story. In my collages I’m always curious to explore the relationship between shapes and interpretation. The brain seem to have the need to make a connection between the different shapes a person perceives. In the stone age it was most important to recognize the shapes of a predator if you wanted to stay alive. Identifying patterns that could result in some kind of danger.
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The same we still do in everyday life. But we also recognize emotions we want to or don’t want to be part of, just by looking at a situation in your daily scenery. This fascinates Veerman. While working on a new piece, using themes like uneasyness, violence, emptyness, vulnerability and chaos, Veerman tries to find the exact point where recognition and abstraction meet. Cutting out shapes, using lines, color gradation and all kind of different shades of grey to find a balance between the recognizability and the abstraction.
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For the project Caterpillar PATRICIA WERNECK RIBAS went through more than ten years of photographic self portraits and transformed these, once images, into something completely new, playing with different shapes and colors. The photographs went through a process of total transformation, being first destroyed and then recycled, shaped and then painted so that no traces of the original images are left. With this work she investigates the need for images, specially those of the self in a moment in time when we get bombarded with billions of images on a daily basis.
The foundation of DALEEN BLOEMERS’ work is based on her interest in how people interact with each other on a daily basis. The feeling of awkwardness which appears when you experience miscommunication or misunderstanding. Bloemers often finds herself in situations were she feel very uncomfortable and does not know how to react. Afterwards she wonders if she acted differently or why people react the way they do. Is she still the same person? When does this awkward feeling arise? And Why? Bloemers develops postures that do not follow the logical criteria we use to define the human body. This results in distorted bodies that no longer seem to have any identity but do try to regain themselves. Her work is an ongoing process in which she makes work intuitively and by experimenting with different materials. This way, she discovers new steps to deepen. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned.
UNA GILDEA loves the madness of collage. A medium, in the manner she uses it, that allows her to juxtapose recognizable found images and transformed cutouts in pictorial narratives that invite the viewer to apply their own stories. Narratives at once oddly recognizable, yet uncomfortably odd; narratives often downright obscene, whilst pushing the chuckle-button; narratives that always aim to open the chute direct to the subconscious, that provoke an intuitive, not literal, sense, of what’s going on. That is Gildea’s goal in their making and what she hope the viewer will respond to in the viewing. Sounds like fun? It is, and that’s what Gildea aims for – her work is playful, ironic, full of humorous observations on the absurdity of life.