Private View: Friday 22nd of November 2024, 6-8pm
Berlin
Maeve van Klaveren’s drawings invite us into a curious kind of twilight zone. A Room Filled With Memories, Where Everything Feels Ordinary Until It Is Not, the title of her solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, is the place at which the boundaries between the internal and external worlds become soft and porous, where layers of time unravel. Rendered in delicate, textured tones, these quiet, intimate scenes reflect on our personal and collective environments and the ways in which our past experiences and dreams permeate the present.
Van Klaveren’s compositions are drawn from her daily observations and thoughts which she records in written form before using found imagery and her own photographs to imagine a visual narrative that slowly evolves through the mark-making process and her engagement with colour. She sees each of the works in this latest exhibition as an individual story that plays out within its own confinements, but also contributes to a wider mood. We might notice, for instance, the recurring presence of cats. In Nowhere We Need to Be, a tabby lies sleeping peacefully in the curve of the woman’s body while in Together, the protagonist is accompanied by three feline friends: one cradled on her lap, another curled against her thigh and one draped over her shoulder, its yellow eyes seemingly staring directly at the viewer. In both of these works, the cats appear to be not just companions but extensions of the figures – different selves or emotional states manifested in feline form.
The woman in Reading also ‘holds’ a cat – although this time it is a pictorial representation on the cover of her book, De Zwarte Cat (The Black Cat) by Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s horror story in which the narrator befriends and then tortures cats initially appears at odds from the quiet homely scene which van Klaveren’s figure occupies, but there are subtle clues that the imaginative world she has entered may be seeping out into her reality: the black pattern on the base of her lamp is leaking through its edges, while the inky blue space around her evokes the idea of a transitional state, the coming of night.
Keepsake, one of two drawings in the exhibition from which the female figure is absent, takes the form of a traditional still life with a vase of flowers and fruits arranged on a table. As is typical of the genre, there is a memento mori – one blackened bloom – but there is also a selection of more intimate objects: purple crystals, a shell, spotted pebbles, a tiny black hand. These, we assume, are the keepsakes from the drawing’s title or in van Klaveren’s words ‘ensouled objects’ that hold the memories of the figure who collected (or drew them) while also serving as a kind of offering to the viewer. ‘They are objects that invite self-reflection and that have the potential to heal, comfort and replenish,’ says van Klaveren.
Objects in drawings such as Time Passing Through and As the Day Grows Dim may appear more mundane, but their positioning within the composition adds a similar layer of intrigue. In the former the figuresits at a table playing with her necklace; in front of her there’s a notebook, a cup half full of a green liquid and a sliced apple as well as the wooden handle of what we assume is a knife. Behind her, the room has lost its edges to the point of almost becoming abstract – the longer we look, the less we’re sure whether looking at a domestic space or outdoor scene. In As the Day Grows Dim, meanwhile, the protagonist plays with an orange, her gaze turned down towards the bowl; next to the bowl is what looks like a tiny wooden paddle and a pebble arranged on a doily, behind her there is a large-leafed houseplant and a new candle, its wick trailing, uncut. Nothing about these objects on their own is especially remarkable, but within van Klaveren’s careful compositions they are filled with latent possibilities.
Other drawings such as The Garden and Awaking envision groups of women in outside spaces that nevertheless feel intimate, tactile and enclosed. This is largely to do with the colour palette and soft textures of the pastels and watercolours that van Klaveren employs, but there is also a gentle synergy between the figures and the surrounding environments. In The Garden, for instance, a woman dressed in a yellow lies along the horizon line, the curves of her body barely distinguishable from the surface on which she lies while in front of her another figure sits barefoot playing with the stem of a flower. Similarly, in Awaking, the figures appear to be not only at total peace within the landscape, but a part of it, like rivers and hills or ancient rock formations.
Van Klaveren has described her use of colour as an expression of feeling; we might say the same for the objects she chooses to represent. These are drawings that unfold before the gaze, hanging in the balance between frailty and power, anxiety and calm.
