With Paintings on Tour
Observations on Marianne Gielen's art
For many centuries, the „Grand Tour“ was a sine qua non not only for aristocrats,
but also for countless generations of recently graduated European artists. On
journeys throughout foreign and distant lands the painters, draughtsmen and
lithographers honed their still amateur techniques and, more importantly, deepened their insight into the essential motifs of foreign cultures and nature’s exoticism.
The Berlin painter, Marianne Gielen, also began to travel immediately after concluding her studies at Berlin’s University of the Arts. With the medium of abstract and, occasionally, physical colour block painting as a companion of equal rank in her luggage, she has travelled for many years: thereby not only perfecting her artistic techniques, but also developing a very attentive and sensitive eye for the countries and cultures that she visited. Her interest in global affairs continues to this day and, indeed, she has travelled almost all the continents, worked in countless countries and acquired a veritable treasure trove of impressions and experience, which informs her paintings, watercolours and collages like a memorial and spiritual archive.
Marianne Gielen’s work often manifests an almost anthropological interest in the
culture and contemporary life of the countries she so attentively travels, far beyond any tourists’ fleeting perceptions. Whilst its fundament is unmistakeably European, she adds strata that testify to an intense analysis of the unknown, thus constantly opening up new space and creative areas of work. Her intensive experience of foreign cultures is articulated in the majority of her paintings, collages and photographs primarily by her use of colour, which combines strikingly with the indispensable system of graphic grammalogues and abstract
codes that has defined the artist’s work since her student years in Berlin. Building on the framework laid by western traditions of Modern painting – in particular that of Tachism and the art of Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly – Marianne Gielen has, in the course of the last twenty years, also moved beyond this to develop a distinct graphic language, characterised by an intensive analysis of the artistic media of other cultures and their respective applications of composition, colour and dynamics; and by a thorough regard for international phenomena.
It is crucial that her analysis never remains distanced or stuck in European ways of seeing. Rather, the artist enters into the spirit of each country’s history, cultural traditions and, above all, into its contemporary experience. In preparation for her travels, she endeavours to acquire a deep understanding by reading and studying in advance. Thus, thoroughly briefed and comprehensively informed, Marianne Gielen is at all times able to differentiate between folklore and culture, between tourist cliché and local realities, without imposing typical clichés and our own particular exotic perspective on foreign subjects.
Many inner images originate before the journey begins, as do ideas of what a land might hold in store. These are as much a part of the artist’s luggage as her dictionary and painting materials. Once at her destination, these images enter into a symbiosis with everyday local sights. They overlay one another in the ensuing work – as knowledge overlays experience – creating complex graphic strata and developing their own artistic logic. The artist names this the “spiritual view” of people and nature. Yet it is cultural discourse – even more so than this individual spiritualization process – which is revealed on almost every level of every one of Marianne Gielen’s works. Significant motifs, characteristic colours and graphic structures begin to communicate with one another, enter into relationships with one another, either confirm or challenge one another. They formulate theses and antitheses, search for form and then dissolve that which was found into something indeterminate.
The painting is never restrained by foreground visual impressions. It
persistently goes one step further. She combines that which seems incompatible,
dissects apparent harmonies and orders subsequent disparity anew.
Both on a formal and textual level, traditional learning and immediate experience, intellect and emotion begin to fuse. European composition styles appear alongside African graphic traditions; alongside western classical spatial concepts appear references and patterns from West African cultures as, for example, in the works produced in 2000 in Mali. The famous central perspective becomes a levelling encyclopaedic transparency, and out of a purely spatial unity emerges an almost legible syntax. Signs, codes and grammalogues explode in a cosmos of hugely expressive colourfulness, which in its turn combines “tempered” western hues with the drastic colour selections common to certain places.
Although the point of departure is always the mid-European’s moderate palette,
each of the pictures which emerge before, during or after a long voyage displays in exemplary fashion those brilliant typical local colours which – for example, light
ochre and intensive red – determine nature and culture on the African continent; or, as a further example, the requisite black calligraphy ink with which the artist was preoccupied during a sojourn of several weeks in 2002 in Japan. However, her attention is never devoted only to the colours but also to local artistic media. Hence, she produced in that same year a series of large format “kakemonos” -pictures on paper banners or scrolls – which constituted the basis for an exploration both of Japan’s ancient culture and its modern and gaily glittering contemporary style. Marianne Gielen worked here with traditional Japanese silk paper in a wholly unorthodox fashion. This sensitive material served as her foundation for further technical experiments, for example, the combination of charcoal and oil pastel drawings with acrylic painting and monotypes. Thus history, culture and contemporary currents are reconciled and appear to fit together harmoniously, with regard both to the choice of format and the techniques employed. Only occasionally do figurative motifs crystallize – like significant cultural islands – within these basically abstract compositions.
Such rare excursions into concretion are evidenced most clearly by a series of works on paper produced during and after a long voyage in Russia in 2002. A direct comparison with the numerous photos shot by Marianne Gielen in the vicinity of Novgorod reveals the close connection between a documentary viewpoint and artistic invention. The monuments of a thousand year old history – churches, monasteries and fortresses – appear in the dynamic coloration and the physical texture of the pictures as abbreviations of a visual narrative, and yet simultaneously become once again an integral element of the abstract composition. Nothing is unequivocal: everything remains simply a vague inkling of a subjective experience, which transposes the visual impulses into a new artistic totality. These Russian pictures, in particular, are unmistakeable proof
of Marianne Gielen’s capacity for cultural synthesis by artistic means. Colours,
motifs and the consistent reference to art historic traditions – we feel ourselves at
times reminded of works by Chagall – generate a wholly subjective picture of Russia, one that expresses the oppressive inner strife between a powerful past and an uncertain future.
Characteristically, it is precisely such tension that defines those pictures produced during a lengthy stay in the USA in autumn, 2001. The impression created by the terror of 9/11 led Marianne Gielen to deal intensively with American history, in particular with the history of the Civil War and one of its most potent symbols. And thus, repeatedly, it is the pithy colours of the Union Jack, the combination of strong blue and red tones on a light background, which define a series of particularly expressive works. These pictures are not explicitly narrative: they have no story to tell, and remain exclusively abstract paintings. Yet, nonetheless, the country’s dramatic history and its both historical and contemporary conflict between freedom and violence have written themselves subtly into the occasionally aggressive coloration and vehement flow. The thrilling character of these pictures thus communicates something of the empathetic and simultaneously critical feelings that moved the artist in contemporary America.
The most recent destination of these wide-ranging artistic expeditions was India,
where Marianne Gielen travelled in early 2004 on a six-week grant. On the Indian
sub-continent, too, she not only gained profound insight into the country’s cultural history but also devoted the same attention to modern social realities. There emerged both large format abstract pictures and a series of illuminating collages, in which the artist was preoccupied not just with the constantly refashioned paper dragons, or kites, but also with integrating modern comics into her collages: those popular picture stories that occasionally offer interesting insights. These works, whilst reflecting western medial innovations, also trace cultural breaks and the often playfully surmounted borders between religious tradition and contemporary life in an era of globalisation, without by any means wishing to appear admonishing or historically illuminating.
For all her attentiveness to contemporary frictions and problems, Marianne Gielen’s painting remains extremely poetic. Time and again, the location in which the artist lives and works determines her pictures in the most comprehensive sense. Moreover, the location determines the nature of her confrontation with a country’s facets, and, especially, that with her own subjective perception. Out of her sense of belonging to nature and society, her preoccupation with history and culture and her intense participation in contemporary life, the artist develops her personal attitude and her emotional relation to the world. Feeling, understanding and experience are thus the central constants of her comprehensive artistic oeuvre, in which two essential qualities combine: an equally loving and yet critical view of the world, and a likewise sensitive and unwavering introspection. Alongside an attentive observation of the external world, the persistent examination of one’s own position in a global totality exposed to such diverse influences remains wholly essential. All these aspects – these vital questions and hard won answers, this constant search and the joy of discovery – continue to flow, time and again afresh, into the lively and powerful painting of Marianne Gielen.