Hereby an overview about the works I made in 2017 for the series "Brave new old Worlds"

 

                                     A little bit of warmth

When there is nothing more than a simple fire!

Hereby an overview about the works I made in 2017 for the series "Brave new old Worlds">>

​​​​​​​When you put different things in a row, you are collecting. I have been collecting all my life.

Collecting leads to insights that a single work cannot lead to. It draws the path of the road travelled. A road taken that could not be seen before but that only takes shape from a multitude of interwoven memories.

My paintings contain my observations about my time. The works about the time span 1990 - 2016 are brought together and critically illustrated by the titles. The series is still being expanded.

The Story

I am fascinated by the work of Goya, who in his graphics and black paintings was particularly critical of his contemporaries, memories, testimonies of the war between Spain and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this, I see parallels with my own time. And also about the 19th century mentality of intolerance. The human situation has hardly improved, now - 200 years later.

Wars are numerous and spread across our planet like local fire. With more horrific consequences. As in biblical catastrophes, man is destroying his environment, his living space, his existence, his fellow man. You only have to collect images to prove it.

The effect

An installation of mine paintings was built on this basis. Can mankind change at all? What is needed to do so? How is empathy developed in mankind?

The collected images MEMORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY are numerous and everywhere.

Prophetic predictions, testimonies of revenge, oppression, blindness, extreme greed, vanity, megalomania, disruption, together with other phenomena such as globalisation.

It is this 21st century material that I work with. It is my time.

My medium is painting, sometimes the object. Since art is transformation, the image is modified. It is the unreal of reality, cast in bearable form.

My technique is used to support this. The touch is the creative medium and is used in such a way that it does not completely disrupt the readability, but disintegrates it in different degrees.

Consciously used, sometimes on the edge of abstraction. The medium is used systematically, but written spontaneously to preserve the emotion. The design is unthinkable without computer design and bound to it. The contemporary aspect is also there.

But it always remains painting; an image of stratification by content, form, colour, touch, held together.

© Gabriella Cleuren 2016