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Overview:

-Deep Pillow solo exhibition Deep Pillow Harkawik Gallery New York USA, 2023
-House of Men: in Transit to the Hereafter, text by Machteld Leij, catalogue House of Men, translation: Beth O’Brien, 2022 -The Rooms of Marenne Welten, text by Marjolein van de Ven, catalogue House of Men, translation Beth O’Brien, 2022 -House of Men, foreword bij Dingeman Kuilman, catalogue House of Men, translation Beth O’Brien, 2022 -Mirrows, interview by Toniann Fernandez, solo show Mirrors Harkawik Gallery New York USA, 2022
-Play Yesterday, text by: Anne-Marie Poels, catalogue Play Yesterday, Gallery Albada Jelgersma Amsterdam, 2018 -Skipping Away, poem by Maria Barnas, catalogue It is not all right Museum de Pont Tilburg, 2014/2015
-Indefinable Places, text by: Hendrik Driessen, It is not all right catalogue Museum De Pont Tilburg, 2014/2015
-Intuition + interpretation + projection, text by Rutger Wolfson, catalogue Marenne Welten, De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, 2000
-The camouflage colour of the image, text by Lisette Pelsers, catalogue Marenne Welten De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, 2000
-Expedition, text by Guido de Werd, catalogue Expedition Museum Kurhaus Kleve (D), 2006

Deep Pillow
Harkawik Gallery New York USA, 2023

Harkawik is pleased to present Deep Pillow, our second solo exhibition with Dutch painter Marenne Welten. The exhibition marks a crucial point in Welten’s artistic development, as she explores new mid and large-scale formats, creating a series of striking pictures that interrogate the interplay between memory and architecture. Deep Pillow sees Welten intensifying the sculptural qualities of her paintings, creating works as fragmented, densely layered and unfixed as memories themselves. They are borne from an obsessive, lifelong investigation into the repercussions of a singular family trauma; here she is both storyteller and psychologist, composing pictures and reconstructing early life memories in the same unified gesture.

Welten’s process is perfectly matched to the investigation central to her work. It is impossible to imagine her technique, which involves composing the picture in layers of heavy white oils, then carving back in with dabs of color, applied to another subject, and equally difficult to see how any other approach could suit her. As she hews interior spaces from busy, buttressed regions of teeming pastels, she generously opens a door towards intimacy, offering the viewer vignettes of everyday life, rife with melancholy, loss, and contemplations that are at once deeply idiosyncratic and universal. Welten offers us a view of a delicate process of reconstruction; in that sense, her project recalls Mike Kelley’s “Educational Complex” (1995), Gregor Schneider’s ongoing work, “Haus u r,” or Kaari Upson’s speculative “Larry Project.” Indeed, it is the dilemma that every sculptor faces—whether to work in an additive or subtractive fashion—that Welten embraces and extrapolates onto the picture plane.

Welten’s paintings have a tendency to reorient the viewer’s perception of color, depth and scale. Because she buries vibrant bursts of color in sheets of white and dark paint, subtle chromatic gestures are initially hard to discern. In Like Alice, and Livingroom, subjects emerge like apparitions, as if conjured from a dream, or else “pasted” into their environment. In Birthday Present, and Table & Chairs, colorful textiles threaten to overtake their users; parsing the compositional landscape of these works is an additional journey through perceptual phenomena. 4 Chairs 4 Disks features no subjects yet brims with life, stacked dishes and dinner chairs protruding from the table, laughs floating in from a nearby room; yet as dense and psychologically loaded as Welten’s paintings are, moments of uncanny humor and coincidence abound. Here, pants drape off the table, as if the lack of a body to fill them is a means to bring levity to absence, to the specter of death.

In these works, Welten demonstrates how the objects we are surrounded by acquire meaning; signifiers of our personal histories that ignite paths towards remembrance. The objects that fill her paintings attain the exalted status of an artifact, and stand as a gentle testimony to the private nature of life’s most significant moments. Underneath the swirled surfaces of her paintings, one cannot help but feel like a child peering down a corridor towards their own mother or father standing in the doorway. Some of “Deep Pillow’s” most surprising paintings pick up earlier works, like 2013’s Kitchen I, in their use of swooping gestures that casually delineate volume. The orb-ed chandeliers of Falling Night hover over a family like ghostly bodies, their thin marks both depicting levity and providing a respite from the painting’s thick impasto. Between Stairs and Cupboard and Innocent IV make further use of these broad, swooping regions.

Welten’s canvases themselves underscore the physicality of the object. In Like Alice, a figure, composed of the same shaggy stuff of her surroundings, looms in the foreground, her neck craned awkwardly to accommodate the top edge of the painting. In Man, and The Last Sleep, we see the mutable properties of a doorway; turned lengthwise, it becomes a coffin. In the exhibition’s title work, the implied weight of a sleeping figure leaves a physical indentation on its surface, gobs of white paint pushing into the canvas to accommodate her. This “push” might be the exhibition’s most poignant moment, in which we see most clearly the gentle embrace of a final respite—nothing to fear, another of life’s many passages.

Marenne Welten: House of Men, in Transit to the Hereafter
Machteld Leij
Writer and curator
Translation by Beth O’Brien

Residing somewhere in the caverns of the mind are the people we miss, people whose lives have stopped while we, the living, go on.
Call it a memory palace, as writer Joshua Foer did in Moonwalking with Einstein, his 2011 book about memory training. But it’s nicer to envisage that memory palace as a place where those who once lived can at least inhabit modest servants; quarters, just beneath the rafters. Once housed there, they do need to be kept. For without love and attention they dissolve. That we know from the ancient Greeks and their ideas about the hereafter: as long as someone thinks about you, your ghost will be recognizable, and have your own face.

Marenne Welten goes a step further: she wakes history with a kiss and gives it new energy. Her paintings of the elderly men from Breda’s Oudemannenhuis (Home for Old Men) are not intended as portraits of real people. Every one of them represents an old man who lived in this house, but each one is also an individual, albeit imaginary. Welten paints them on a large scale. Overlapping layers of paint serve as the ground from which they loom forth. As if they’ve been sculpted out of the oil substance. Layers of paint accumulate as swipes and strokes bring the faces, the bodies and the postures of the old men into focus. Emerging from the pale green and brown are their eyes, looking tired. Sometimes, though, they have a penetrating gaze. These old men aren’t apt to let us out of their sight.

Being simply themselves, they look vulnerable and sometimes even sad. But in the bright light of the museum, something else occurs
as well. A droopy eye begins to twinkle. The gravity of the paint sings beneath the spotlights. This brings even more life to the men on the museum’s walls. They are the backbone of House of Men. The collages and gouaches that Welten has also produced are beautiful, intricate weaves of thought by the artist, in which she pictured the lives of the old men. Welten moreover delved into the archives of the Oudemannenhuis and discovered rules for the men. They were to have good morals. Experimenting with that idea, Welten has made a gouache of a nude, seductive woman reclining on a man’s bed. He himself is sitting at the edge of the bed, shoulders slumped, head slightly angled. Already guilty.

In view of the home’s strict rules, there is only a minimal possibility that the elderly men ever received female visitors. They slept in
a dormitory, so there was little privacy in those days. But once triggered, the artist’s imagination is unstoppable. Information from the letters she read has seeped into the images she created. Everything is sensed; time and focus go into them. The spacial spatial collages – small, wrought images – are held in old frames that Welten found at flea markets. Some of the cut-out figures had been in her possession for a long time. They look as though they’ve been loved in the past. A skeleton figure hung about in Welten’s studio for quite a while, for instance, before ending up in one of her collages. Everything has passed through her hands, and because of that there are traces of being touched, being moved. That brings all of the images closer, makes them intimate. It’s like leafing through your grandparents’ old photo album. What you see is distant in terms of time, yet it’s familiar, like a cherished memory.

The works on paper come across as being ‘lived in’, more than simply nostalgic. They are fictionalized history, invented by the artist after lengthy and thorough research in the archives of the Oudemannenhuis and browsing through the museum’s collection and Breda’s municipal archives. Old photographs show how the men lived: eating together at long tables in the dining hall, sleeping together in
a dormitory. A curtain around a bed provides a small amount of privacy. Welten filled a room with her portraits of lordly figures. Not painted from photographs, but from her memory. Accounting books and handwritten letters are on display. For a moment it’s as if we’re in the Oudemannenhuis from a century ago: while everything exudes order and tidiness, there is also a sense of power and powerlessness. The power of the regents, and the sacred duty of the old men to obey the rules. To eat whatever is served and always make one’s bed.

A second, more intimate space in the exhibition contains votive offerings and relics that Welten came across in the collection of the Bisschoppelijk Museum. The votive offerings are made of tin and represent arms and feet, meant as thanks to a saint for healing particular body parts. The relics are set in small, beautifully worked medallions. These haven’t been presented in a historical way, but have instead become the visual elements or building blocks of the exhibition. They have an air of hopefulness: a belief in healing and trust in religion. But there is also a sense of superstition in depicting what has healed as a way to communicate through symbolic language. That bears an affinity with magical thinking. And this intrigues Welten to no end. She elaborates on the form of some decorative reliquaries by cutting, out of white paper, her own version of one: a family portrait – father, mother, children. White vines contain and embrace the whole. Along the edges are small details, the artefacts of a childhood that has become a memory. The votive offerings can be seen as a cross between hope and superstition. Welten takes the idea of the votive offering and wards off the past with it. Not only that of the nameless old men in her exhibition, but also her own youth. The artist lost her father at a young age. Had her father remained alive, he would have been an old man by now. With her search for the old men in Breda there arose a longing for a glimpse of what her father might have been at an older age.

Indirectly, as if squinting at the subject and seeing shadows at the corner of her eye. That’s where the image of her lost father lies. In her votive offering made of paper, Welten introduces subtle references to her family history. A tiny car pulling a caravan chugs along the edges of the oval emblem. Up and down hills, all the way to Eastern Europe, where the family often spent vacations during the 1970s. Other references can be found throughout the exhibition: a bird in an old frame is actually a little sculpture that her father once made. Welten learned about the history of the Oudemannenhuis from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her father’s family lived nearby. They saw the old men walk past the house, her aunt told her. At the time they felt sorry for the men, who had often ended up in the home due to a lack of family or relatives. It brought Welten closer to her own father, who as a boy – in her imagination – might have been terrified by the very idea of this place.

Welten paints in the twilight zone between abstraction and realism. Her portraits of the old men illustrate this well. Their bodies – their rib cages, arms and shoulders – are lines in the paint; they’re practically geometric. But they are undeniably human. Old, yes, but alive. Nonetheless, there are also four paintings of men lying down, painted as though they’re landscapes. Are they dead? No, actually it seems more as though they’re sleeping. But we suspect that they’ve never been so close to death. With her paintings Welten takes us to a no man’s land between now and the past, between life and death. House of Men is a wonderful suggestion of that inconceivable journey that every living being will ultimately need to undertake.

Welten’s collages and gouaches are dream-like images, sometimes verging on the surreal. One gouache shows a skeleton against a yellow background. His arms are stretched out: in one hand he holds a proper suit, in the other an empty skin, clearly that of a human being. Behold man: life and death, a suit and a skin. No more than that is left of us after death, Welten seems to say.

Compassion is expressed in the paintings and drawings of House of Men. The gravity of old age but, above all, love and gentleness can be felt in Welten’s work. A body of flesh and blood, as evoked by Welten evokes this in thickly applied and worked layers of paint, comes close to the ephemeral memory of a human life that has already passed on to the hereafter.

The Rooms of Marenne Welten
Marjolein van de Ven Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Stedelijk Museum Breda Translation by Beth O’Brien

While preparing for the exhibition House of Men at Stedelijk Museum Breda, I became better acquainted with the work of Marenne Welten, but also with the person behind thepaintings, gouaches and collages. Every conversation, every time I saw her work and collaborated with her on the exhibition, I gained a better understanding of how her work comes about and what her motives are. Her intuitive practice is closely linked to her personality and events in her life, which yields work that is very stratified. Formally, collages are constructed with layered images of spaces, people and objects; and figuratively, histories are interwoven with her own personal memories. This ’double agenda’ in her images is a breeding ground for the imagination.

The emotions of a real situation
Are shy, but if they can find a mask
they are shameless exhibitionists.
-Ted Hughes in Letters of Ted Hughes

Marjolein van de Ven: In House of Men you interweave stories about Breda’s Oudemannenhuis with your own memories and feelings.
The work is actually about you, yetthis isn’t immediately apparent to the viewer. As the exhibition approached, you mentioned a quote by the English poet and writer Ted Hughes, in Letters of Ted Hughes, which come from a letter that he wrote to his daughter. Can you tell me more about this quote and why it was so important to you in the development of this project?

Marenne Welten: We were in the midst of the project, and I was looking for the right form. I wasn’t able to find my footing at first. Although I had already said, in fact, that I wanted to paint the elderly men, I couldn’t figure out why. It often happens to me, that I have a subject in mind without knowing what draws me to it. Then I read a letter by Ted Hughes to his daughter Frieda, in which he says that when you portray emotions directly in your work, or in a piece of writing, you end up getting stuck because it’s too direct and thus becomes too two-dimensional. Whereas when you package it or dress it, as it were – put a ‘mask’ on it - it ultimately comes across more powerfully. What you want to put across isn’t immediately visible, but it can be sensed. That point of departure struck me as being very interesting, as I realized I had actually been working that way all my life. In every project I choose a subject that I use as a pretext for telling my own story.

MV: In House of Men the building that houses the museum is the point of departure for the exhibition. Prior to the exhibition we established a time frame, from 1798 to 1954, the period during which the building was called the ‘Oudemannenhuis’ and when it was the only place in the city where elderly men could go to spend the rest of their days. You had already begun making collages and gouaches that took inspiration from the Middle Ages, however, when the building served as a gasthuis. Why did you initially adopt this early period as a starting point?

MW: For House of Men, I sought connections to universal themes and symbols from the past. I’ve always been interested in the Middle Ages. If you ask me, these weren’t only dark centuries; on the contrary, I think some very remarkable things happened during this period. To me it was an eye-opener that the magical thinking of a child, and the compulsive actions that this can trigger, may well be remnants of the Middle Ages, and that we’re closer to the Middle Ages than we realize. Even today, superstition is still very much alive. After my father’s death, I had imposed all sorts of restrictions on myself in order to keep our family ‘safe’. Skeletons, for instance – and all things that related to death – were taboo. In my work I violate these taboos and restrictions that I had very deliberately placed on myself as a child. It feels emancipating to take this apart by degrees and to employ it as an instrument throughout the work process.

MV: The themes that continue to surface in your paintings and works on paper are universal: dealing with the other, vulnerability, death. Are you consciously concerned with these themes while making a work?

MW: Themes are something that develop in an intuitive way; I can’t plan these in advance. When I was halfway through this project, I occasionally thought: where is this headed? The Oudemannenhuis – a well-known place in Breda – was the point of departure for the creation of a new work. But the exhibition isn’t clear-cut, since it’s not only about the men in the house. I tell multiple stories that are intertwined. Universal themes, like those you mention, have arisen from these in an unconscious way. It has also become, for example, away for me to ‘talk’ about my own life, about my father and about how I experience getting older. Actually, I work like a writer, but then with images. By constructing a particular situation in my work, I provide multiple ways to approach possible narratives.

‘There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same.’
– Paul Auster, in ‘The Invention of Solitude’Solitude (1982)

MV: Your father died when you were still a child. That has had a considerable impact on you and is a subject that continues to surface in your work. Can you tell me more about the presence of (the memory of) your father in your work?

MW: When Paul Auster cleared out the house of his deceased father, he discovered that many things acquire meaning only after someone has died. Old socks are first dirty and worthless, but once someone dies, they suddenly say something about the deceased person’s character and way of life. In order to reconstruct what happened after my father’s death, I began painting. As though I were in a dream, I mentally walked through my parental home and observed its rooms, the furniture and other things left behind, such as a piece of clothing, medication or an armchair. These very gradually became consistent ‘props’ throughout my work. During the work process these components mingle with the subject that I’m occupied with at the time. Via this way of working I transform a personal tragedy into universal themes and symbolism.

After I’ve finished a very intensive project, I go back to a familiar ritual in my work. That’s when I wander mentally through my parents’ house and start all over again at the source, the act of painting. I simplify the themes and paint the house, each time anew: the stairs, the kitchen, the shoes and pyjamas. These need not be literal depictions. Because I’m familiar with the images, I can paint the stairs according to my sense of them and not as they were. I try to detect the emotion evoked by that fragment, and after that I try to paint this emotion. Then it sometimes even becomes abstract or similar to the way children pain or draw. I don’t set out to work on the basis of logic or from an image that I have in mind beforehand, but navigate purely according to the feeling that it triggers. Time and again, I go back and start the exercise all over. I often use this way of working as an investigation of form when preparing for a subsequent project.
A dream about my childhood home has been crucial to my life as an artist. During this dream I found myself in a room that I disliked. But by looking at the room through the eyes of a painter, I was able to transform it into a painterly dimension. Because of that it was no longer a room that I didn’t like; it had become a room built with composition, color and paint. The dream made me realize that a formal approach to the subject takes the sting out of the personal aspect; it becomes less emotionally charged and thereby manageable.

MV: The act of mentally ‘walking’ through the rooms of your parental home is a way of reconstructing your father. But the metaphor of a house, with rooms that you walk through, is also a way for you to approach your own artistic practice.

MW: In the past I would compare my work to a house. The house has a main room full of doors that provide access to all sorts of adjoining rooms. In the early part of my career I visited all of those rooms, opened every door. I kept on straying farther and would make an increasing number of detours. Like a magpie I would bring all kinds of things back to the main room. About seven years ago, I decided I had had enough of poking around in all those rooms. I realized that it was all there, right in front of me. The stash of tools and experience that I had piled up in the main room still offers me enough inspiration and material to work with. That provides good concentration.

MV: Now that the exhibition is open, we can look back as well as forward. What surprised you the most in this exhibition, and what will you do next?

MW: Two things surprised me. First and foremost: the fact that I can paint on a large scale and still maintain my own style. It was the first time that I had painted with this format – tall and narrow. Although I had to flip a switch, I now know that I can handle these dimensions. There’s still a large empty canvas standing in my studio, and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on it. And second: the realization that the paintings can be displayed together with the gouaches and collages. Prior to this I always presented them separately, but in this exhibition they belong together as an installation. The idea of combining paintings with work on paper opens up possibilities for future projects.

I’d like to delve a bit deeper into two aspects that have emerged in this interview, because they reveal so much about Marenne Welten’s practice. Her mental rooms remind me of the ‘memory palace’ a technique used to enhance recollection by way of a virtual walk through a building. This method refers to a story about the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who managed, following the collapse of a banquet hall, to identify the unrecognizable bodies by visualizing who sat at which table during the meal. Welten employs this memory technique both in the making of new work and during the process of reflecting on her own development, yet she does adapt it to her own needs. With her work she challenges us as viewers to take a walk through our own memory palaces and to investigate anew the recollections and emotions stored in them.
Then there is the metaphorical use of her work as a mask. Throughout the entire world, the mask has traditionally played a role in society: with ritual acts, as an element in theatre and other festivities, but also as a protection against harmful substances and the transmission of disease. While writing this interview I had to think of two specific uses of a mask. Firstly, what is known as the transformation mask, used in ceremonies by the indigenouspeoples of the American (coastal?) northwest and Alaska, in order to illustrate myths, or for shamanistic rituals. These masks usually represent the face of an animal, which can be opened by pulling on a cord.
We also see another type of mask carved from wood: a human face that symbolizes the wearer, who passes from the natural world into a supernatural realm. The transformation symbolized as part of this act brings to mind the different worlds that Welten brings together in her work in a wonderful and surprising way.
Secondly, there is the use of the mask in the Mycenaean culture (1600 – ca.1100 BCE): providing the face of a deceased king with a mask of gold leaf before burial. The aim of this was to preserve facial features. Perhaps Welten’s entire oeuvre could be regarded as a kind of gold-leaf mask, in remembrance of her own facial features.

House of Men Foreword
Dingeman Kuilman
General director, Stedelijk Museum Breda Translation by Beth O’Brien

The monumental part of the Stedelijk Museum Breda building was originally a gasthuis – an accommodation for travellers, pilgrims and homeless people. As of 1643 it served as a home for the elderly men of Breda and those in its vicinity, who bringing to mind the 1975 poem ‘Oud gereedschap mensheid moe’ (Old tools weary of humanity) ’ by H.H. ter Balkt, roughly translated here:

Old tools do not cry in the dark
long road, long road
and sing no blues as they have no voice.

Ter Balkt alludes to traditional farm equipment, obsolete due to modernization. The old men, too, had become useless; : their hands no longer put anything in operation, and their thoughts were stranded in memories.

Yet these same men could not have suspected that, two centuries later, their home would be filled with museum visitors wanting to see Marenne Welten’s House of Men. The project arose from a chance combination of events, including an intertwining of the museum’s history with that of the Welten family. Multiple generations of the artist’s family on her father’s side had lived close to the Oudemannenhuis. The building’s transformation into a museum would have been as unthinkable to them as the idea that one of their descendants would become an artist. Through House of Men the seemingly miraculous confluence of events acquires a destiny, as though higher forces have had a hand. This religious aspect is linked to relics in the museum’s collection from which Welten took inspiration. With the inspirational power of her paintings, she brings the bygone men to life. As a result the exhibition has the quality of a time machine – an interim meeting point for the living and the dead.

House of Men connects art and history, present and past. Welten relates to a tradition of artists who work on the basis of historical themes, places or events.. Their approach manoeuvres between imagination, portrayal, reflection and criticism. For Welten, it is mostly about the first three aspects. A criticism of dire social conditions is implicit in the artist’s works, including her portraits of Oudemannenhuis trustees, figures who project vulnerability rather than haughtiness.

Welten’s work is colored by an awareness echoed in Psalm 103: ‘As for man – his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.’ House of Men is an attempt to prevent, or at least to postpone, the latter. Welten gives these men faces again, so that they can become part of our memory. At the same time the exhibition refreshes our memory of the museum’s building.

Is Stedelijk Museum Breda the ultimate destiny of the Oudemannenhuis? In light of its history —and the darkness cast upon old tools –  it seems highly unlikely to me. But somehow, after seeing House of Men, I find that a consoling thought.

Mirrows
Interview with Marenne Welten
by Toniann Fernandez
for Harkawik Gallery, New York USA, 2022

When did you first start painting?

I started painting seriously in 1998. At that time I was working on a show at The Vleeshal Middelburg. Before then, I made gouache paintings on paper about my thoughts and feelings. The gouaches were centralized, which is to say, I worked from the center, so it was obvious to paint on canvas in the same way.

Why paint from the center?

It was a safe way; it seemed logical. My early paintings were predominantly white texture, and the figures in the center were mostly suffering or injured people. They were often missing one leg or one eye. After a while I wanted to explore the whole surface of the canvas. This is when I started to explore color as well.

Many of the paintings from this time are relatively small. Why small paintings? What do they do differently?

Small paintings are a way for me to explore one side of the possibilities of oil paint. They force me to act fast without hesitating or
having too much time to think or correct. By painting fast I’m less aware of order, form, composition, color etc. I’m shaking off the things
I know. This process also teaches me how to deal with a big canvas. When you paint on a large canvas, you have to think about how you’re going to compose it. It’s more complex.

There’s been a shift in your work recently, away from a thin dabbing or accumulating marks on the canvas, to a heavy impasto surface. Here it almost feels like you’re carving an interior out of the paint itself. Can you speak to this shift?

Yes, I have painted with thin layers, and those paintings are special. But when I would come closer to a finished painting, I felt disappointed. The paintings were very well received, so there was really no reason to change my practice in that sense, but I wanted
to explore oils more fully.

For these newer paintings, I start with a thick layer of white oil paint, and then I paint on top of that surface with color. It’s kind of a struggle. It’s not easy to paint color over a thick layer–everything is a mess. These thick layers of paint also take a very long time to dry, which is another reason why I like this way of working. When working with thin layers of paint, I could only work for a day before it was dry and I had to stop. These thick layers give me much more time to work.

Is there something about the struggle to paint this way that appeals to you?

We are educated to make perfect images. When you go to school, they teach you how to draw a perfect image. I want to destroy the image you have learned to find. I like when it becomes a mess. I want to destroy the image in my head when I am painting. So I make
this kind of mess, to see what follows.

Imagine a house. The people who live there make the front beautiful and clean. They put all of their stuff–the rubbish, the things they don’t use–in the back so nobody can see it. That’s what I’m interested in finding. That’s where you find the subject, and I think the
subject has to come from the paint. The paint is pushing the subject to the surface. It comes from a space between the abstract
and the figurative. It is emotional, but also very formal.

The works in Mirrows are perhaps, at first sight, formal. They’re about painting, but they also have an emotional layer underneath
the form. I don’t want to express emotions directly. I will always look for a formal way to express them.

How does having more time to work the surface of the painting affect the image you create? Are they more or less predictable as compositions?

When you have thick layers, there is time for things to go wrong. Sometimes a painting goes very wrong! You can feel it. It is a strange feeling. But once you know it is going wrong, you no longer have anything to lose. That is the most interesting moment for me. Perhaps
I am always looking for the moment when things are going wrong, because I think that is when the most interesting parts of the painting can emerge. In that way, the painting becomes a record of the search.

Time also gives me the chance to repair the damage I’ve made, to allow the subject to come forward. The subject remains unimaginable until it comes forward, and for that to happen, I need time to allow something to come forward, be destroyed, come forward, be destroyed, over and over again. It’s like a puzzle. Things eventually fall into place, but it takes time.

This process is like riding a horse. If the rider has control, you don’t really feel the power of the horse. But if you let the horse take control, you really feel its power. In this way, I am painting the way I try to live my life. I learn a lot about my own life and my personality from thinking about and looking at the way I paint.

In Rooms, 2020, the paint is so thick that it has an almost sculptural quality. The standing figure is emerging from the painting,
lifting off the canvas. Are you looking for a third axis for the picture?

Yes, indeed, I’m looking for another dimension in this painting. The painting is about a girl sitting on a chair. You can see her back.
It looks as if a man is standing behind her, but is he really? Perhaps the man is in her thoughts or in another room parallel to the room where she is sitting. You can feel the possibility of space and time between them.

This painting seems to have a narrative component too.

Yes. When I started painting 20 years ago, I was painting about the death of my father. He died when I was 11 years old. And no one explained to me what had happened. Of course they told me he had died, but no one told me what happened. Everyone wanted to go
on with life as if nothing had happened. My mother didn’t want to show me photos of him. She couldn't–she was overcome with grief. When I was about 40 or so, I still wanted to know what had happened to my father. The only way to do that was to construct a narrative.

Several paintings show quotidian scenes of domestic life. Are these the scenes of your childhood? Are they part of the narrative?

To build the narrative, I go back to the house where I grew up, in my imagination, of course. I go back there, into the memory, and see the things that my father left behind. Shoes, books, these things tell you a lot about a person after they are gone.

I began painting rooms, shoes. At first these things can seem empty, but they were all the information that I had, and when they are empty, you find what lives inside of them. A room is very emotional. If ten people go into a room, and you ask them what they saw, one by one, each one of them will tell you a different story. People enter a space, and they fill it with their own emotions, memories, experiences. Everyone has their own thoughts and their own imaginations.

A long time ago, I had a dream. I was in the living room at my parents’ house where I grew up. When I was young, I hated that room.
I always felt disgusted in that room. But in the dream, I didn’t feel disgust. It was just a room, a color composition. I could see the space with painter’s eyes, and it felt completely different. I realized that looking at these memories with my painter’s eyes helped me a lot. After that, I began interacting with my memories from childhood formally, and it helped me to live through them and to understand them. Painting is a way of understanding life.

What is the meaning behind the term “Mirrow?” Is it a cross between a window and a mirror?

The simple answer is that it was a mistake, a misspelling, but of course, a mirror and a window have similarities. They both have a frame in which things happen. In a window the spectator looks into the distance, in the other the spectator looks at the self, but they can both reflect thoughts and memories instead of the reality of what is being seen.

For me, a mirror will always be an object with a different meaning. The experience of losing my father at a young age left me acutely aware that people could disappear, and I wanted to prevent this from happening to me and the rest of my family, so I made up a series of rules. I was 11 years old and had the magical mind of a child. I decided a mirror was a dangerous object because it could reflect parts of the body, and somehow I thought the reflecting body part would be in danger. Of course, I didn’t tell my mother these rules. I remember walking through a big hallway full of mirrors with her, trying not to break the rules without her noticing. It really was a nightmare. A window was less dangerous within my rules, though I was only permitted to look at things hrough the window that I wouldn’t mind disappearing.

How do you decide when a painting is complete?

I don’t. It happens. The only thing I have to do is to be alert for that special moment. And of course, there are a lot of special moments while painting, so you have to be very concentrated and equipped to spot the moment. It’s almost always a mixture of intensive attention, intuition, acceptance of the unknown. The worst experience for an artist is the moment when you can’t see the painting anymore because you, yourself, have become the painting. Sometimes when this happens you have to look at the painting upside down or see it reflected in a mirror to see it again.

The active work that I do is the building and destructing of the image again and again until it falls into form, a form I couldn’t have expected or imagined.

Play Yesterday
by: Anne-Marie Poels
published: book Play Yesterday, Galery Albada Jelgersma Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2018

…“He had Come to New France hoping for quick riches and a return to Old France, but now he wondered if his destiny was
not linked to the vast land with his infinite forests and violent rivers. Was not this country his place in the world?”
Annie Proulx, Barkskins

The bleak expanse of the prairie: harsh, treeless country where the view is dominated by grass, bushes and scrub. The pioneers,
sitting bolt upright on their chairs, their hands resting somewhat awkwardly on their thighs, staring sullenly into the camera lens.
In the background a simple sod house, around them the children and whatever possessions they have: a table with a melon on it,
a horse or a cow, some household goods….

We in the West have for years experienced large waves of immigration, which mainly scare us: and it may be worth remembering that the whole history of North America is one of discovery and migration, a westward movement in search of new land to cultivate and- as has now also long become clear - oppression of the indigenous population. When Marenne Welten took part in an exhibition in New York in 2016, she was so captivated by the history of the pioneers in the new continent that she started a project on the subject. The exploration of uncultivated land; the harshness of the places where the colonists ended up, how the landscape determined the rawness of their existence, the tenacity they brought to their new lives, and the crime that sprang up in their wake - all these things are dealt with in
Play Yesterday, whether very directly in the subject matter, or more subtly, as a background atmosphere that shimmers through the
recent oil paintings and paper collages.

Almost by analogy with the settlers who sought uncultivated land and discovered new places: artists are pioneers: and Marenne Welten pursues her own search for the potential of oil on canvas. White, which always played such an important role, recurs here; but whereas
in her earlier canvases she left spaces blank, here it is a thick undercoat to be ‘painted against’ as she elaborates the subject and background- a delaying element as an uphill battle. Eschewing monochrome, she applies numerous coats of paint and colour over the absorbent white, than whipes firmly over them with tissues and brushes. The result: canvases full of movement, in which the brushstrokes perform a jerky dance and the subjects almost dissolve into their background like visions from a distant past: the pioneering husbands and wives on their chairs outside their cabins, the farmers amid their promising farmland or posing next to their horse, the wild landscapes…. There is time in these canvases, an incessant accumulation of colour and material that ineluctably into a picture.
Welten’s struggle with the paint seems to echo the settlers’ own figurative struggle.

Sam and Billy
Welten depicts the lawlessness of those times even more directly when she takes criminals as her subject. In an initial stage of her project this leads to a series of vivid paintings of bandits who can hardly be identified as such. She places them on the absorbent white surface in mainly cold, bluish-green hues - the faces of men whose piercing eyes seems to draw you into the paintings. Not literal reproductions, but fushions of the many images that Welten has by now explored and incorporated into her work.

On a second level she takes the investigation further: death approaches us merciless as we see the lifeless criminal brothers Sam and Billy who, to strike fear into others, were badly strung up on the wall of a house, their hands handcuffed in front of them, their eyes closed; their heads tilted towards each other. What seems merely like a scrap of history, a cruel detail from a distant time and place; turns out to be much closer than we might at first image. Suddenly, far from being just two footnotes to the exploration of America’s Wild West,
the almost intuitively painted brothers symbolise a very direct confrontation with death, the breaking of a taboo; and the series of portraits can also be interpreted as a search for the men Welten never really knew. Here she is harking back to her own past, in which she lost her father when she was still very young. She is not interested in literally depicting the time that lies behind us and the events that unfolded there, but translates all this into something else, using other people’s stories and characters to tell us about herself and the world.
She takes history, and places it like a layer over her own life; and it is where the two come into contact that imagination comes into play.

The interplay of collages
Juggling with characters, playing with the past, swapping today and yesterday- this is how Play Yesterday can be read. An interplay that without doubt is visually expressed most directly in a whole series of collages that Welten created during the project - a technique she had used before. The collages introduce - by cutting - an angularity into the images, leaving Welten free to divide up the surface and balance the space at will, calmly and intuitively. Based on the gouaches and pencil drawings he has always produced, here she uses
a much more playful range of colors to show men and women rolling over each other, household goods and farm tools bouncing around, exlorers’boats landing…. Tiny details refers the many sources she absorbed like a sponge: thus the skeletons recall the killings in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, another tale of colonists in the West (specifically California’s Salinas Valley).

Here again, storylines converge, characters tumble over one another, the present and the past touch and merge. And perhaps this is how the project should primarily be seen, just like Marenne Welten’s earlier ones: as a projection of the points of contact between then and now, between the life of an individual and that of a much larger community, in order to open our eyes and make us realize that our fears and nothing new, and that they make us who we are. All of us are people, all of us are traveling.

Skipping Away
by: Maria Barnas 

I

There is the room that cannot stay still
The walls skip away at the lightest, slightest touch
and the chairs sag so. The table wavers as always.

and the windows, the windows linger in the rippling
sunlight. What vessel is moored here? Who calls this
home. Close the curtains gently please.

II

There is a world that occasionally intrudes. With bells
and bellows and clockes and clamour. Witl loading and labour
and laughter and leaving. And somewhere amongst this

we should find time. Please tell me whet time is
to the second so that we can be sure
we exist or at least can see things go by.

III

There is the soul that waits for me, for it knows
that this head is tired of thinking, swaying
soothing. I call this a heart that speaks.

I hold onto the tremors in the light, the slightest
rumbling of a child’s laugh skipping
in a garden. Hands up! The garden skips within this child.

Indefinable Places 
by: Hendrik Driessen
published: Catalogue It is not all right Museum De Pont Tilburg, 2014/2015

In her paintings Marenne Welten examines the way in which emotions, associations and memories can influence our perception.
These are small icons of ordinary, nameless places, imbued with mysterious light that seems to penetrate from the back of the canvas. She paints her motifs - a traditionally arranged living room, old-fashioned furniture, perhaps a human figure - as though this needs
to be done in semi-darkness, a she senses her way toward the right form. Her painting is a way of describing what she depicts, usually one color for each part and apparently creating the image in one go.
Although she does go back and reworks certain places with the brush, in order to give the color a bit more weight or to add another one, this occurs only rarely. For the most part, things immediately hit home, and all of it seems to come about in a rapid sucession of descriptive painterly gestures. Her maneuvers with the brush are easy to follow, yet it remains unclear as to where these begin and end. We might think that her approach, the whole of which seems to be the sum of small fields of color that have been applied in transparent strokes, should lead to a complex mosaic, but this is not at all the case. Even though every part of the painting has been painted in
a nearly identical manner, with brushstrokes that seem to comply (or ‘sympathize’) with the depicted form, there nonetheless arises
a surprising spatiality that yeals a readable image.
What we can see or experience in this remains uncertain, and that makes the act of observation all the more interesting. For the viewer, the interior spaces of Marenne Welten’s paintings are nice places to be, but whether the same holds true for those who inhabit this world is another matter.

Intuition + interpretation + projection 
by: Rutger Wolfson
published: exposition catalogue Marenne Welten, soloshow De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, Middelburg 2000

We’re lunching in a cafe in Brussels. We’re having the day’s special: roast beef with spinach and potatoes. The meal reminds me of holidays in England, althought my beer has that typical Belgian flavour. We talk about our plans for the future, the Police are playing -
I have that record too, great drummer - I watch a girl walking in. I begin to realise that my dreary mood stems from an unpleasant conservation the day before.

Whilst all this is happening, I begin to notice my companion’s teeth. Pieces of spinach lodged between aged teeth, neglected through
lack of money, work their way to the forefront of my consciousness and begin to dance in front of my eyes. A moment of alienation.

Marenne Welten has the ability to capture such experiences with great precision. Her paintings either spring from the memory of moments like these, or she experiences them during the process of painting. The various layers forming the foundation of her paintings can be compared to the fragments of memories and impressions during lunch. The dancing bits of spinach-the things that cause her to wonder -are, for example, body parts that to her have suddenly lost their normal meaning. In her perception her own nose, when blocked, grows
to enormous proportions. Or perhaps someone else’s nose, when its shape suddenly strikes her.

Sometimes, you can easily identify yourself with Welten’s work. A portrait of someone whose head is encased in a large cloud, for example, can perhaps remind you of the haze that can paralyse you first thing in the morning. Similary, the painting of the back of a full head of hair will forever be the image I connect with the feeling of my own hair in my neck, when I was still young. This easy recognition allows her paintings to be symbolic of certain memories, feelings and thoughts.

Welten’s symbolism, however, comes about almost intuitively. Therefore- to herself as well- it is at times just as unreliable as dreams are. You know dreams are full of symbolism, but you will never know exactly what the symbols represent. Aftrer all, you are always the one interpreting them and so, inevitably, making your own projections.

This applies more to Welten’s oil paintings than it does to her gouaches. The latter are made at greater speed and with more directness, and so appear to be less ambiguous. Oil paint allows (and at the same time forces) Welten to take more time over her paintings. These have more layers, in both a literal and a figurative sense, and give her space to further develop an important theme in her work: power versus powerlessness. Connecting the gouaches and the oils are Welten’s concentration, surprise, curiosity amd intuition, and the powerful symbols she offers viewers to identify themselves with.

The camouflage colour of the image 
by: Lisette Pelsers
published: catalogue Marenne Welten De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, 2000

White dominates in Marenne Welten’s paintings. Not so much a clear white showing itself as an autonomous colour, but more of an omnipresent, unemphatic glimmer of white, invoking a sense of the absence or fading of colour. In the visual arts, white often represents
a beginning. A white wall, a white canvas waits to be worked on, painted, coloured and at least in part covered.

The images that Marenne Welten extracts from the empty canvas appear unwilling to break loose from the first stage. Because of their material evanescence and sparsity they only just appear to be present. Sometimes, they create an impression of conscious incompletion. They are mostly human figures and heads, children or adults, very occasionally animals, a horse or a dog. Perhaps it is more fitting to speak of apparitions of people and animals, for they are transparent figures with fading contours or drawn with thin, delicate lines.
They haunt an unidentifiable space, looming out of nowhere. They barely have mass, yet find themselves on firm ground.
In spite of the use of oil paints the works are little paintings, sooner reminiscent of the openess and absence of ‘filling’ that more
generally characterizes drawings. In fact scarcely any paint is used, the structure of the linen remains visible. When the images become too concrete, too manifest, paint is removed or everything is covered with a thin, transparent layer of white that, in a sense, pushes bach the representation.

Because of this Marenne Welten’s images seem to come from a different, unreal world. Still, the figures are in themselves familiar,
there is nothing artificial about them. A simple line, just a silhouette suffices to depict a figure. But the almost childlike simplicity and directness chatacterizing the works also contains typical elements such as the emphasizing of certain details, of distortion or
enlargement. A ballerina bears an oversized, top-heavy head on her frail body, a figure lacks a leg, yet stands firmly upright, eyes are overly accentuated into dark, deep caves, a mouth with pronounced teeth turns a face into a grimace. Additionally, images sometimes shift over each other, or people’s and animals’body parts simultaneously adopt different positions.
Alhought the images may well appear to belong to a fleeting, alienating dream, of which some fragments have remained, they rather
stem from a specific experience of reality. Marenne Welten has a formidable ability to superimpose her own projections onto reality.
‘There is no single image. Not even when I close my eyes. When I look at something, it’s almost never in an open-minded way, because
I see, suppose or think several images at one time’. Her perception sometimes turns the world upside down, a man crossing the street
is all at once seen on his head. However, she isn’t just involved in an unavoidable, at times burdening, dialoque with her surroundings,
she also constantly sees herself as an outsider, or through the eyes of an alter ego. The images in the paintings are the necessary outcome of such experiences. The representations she paints are in the head from the outset. She has literally seen them.
The coming into being of a painting is therefore direct and relatively brief. The representation is not ‘conceived’ while working,
it is in fact already present.

Marenne Welten’s struggle with the perception of reality does not resolve itself in the depiction of different images and interpretations. Her work does not offer the viewer a range of possibilities for and variations on a single theme. On the contrary, the images are highly reticent, in effect no more than a thought, a barely uttered word. In this, the direct, simple rendition, at times almost gauche, the use
of colour which tend towards monochrome, the unidentifiable space, all fulfill a function. A definite statement, a definitive image must
be avoided. The obvious is not part of Marenne Welten’s experience. People, things, images are not in stasis, ‘’tomorrow everything
can be different’. Felt too deeply, this realisation is, in its ulimate ramifications, unbearable. Aftre all, it is in the changeability of everything
in life where the root of mortality un avoidably lies. Presumably, this plays a part in Marenne Welten’s restrain towards her subjects.
In the reluctance to ‘capture’ things, people, loved ones in images. The actions of wiping away paint, repainting, applying double representations, all that not only prohibits the unequivocal point of vieuw, but also creates a necessary distance towards the images,
that shroud themselves in the white camouflage colour of the cancas.

Expedition 
by: Guido de Werd
published: catalogue Expedition Museum Kurhaus Kleve (D), 2006

-The title of Marenne Welten’s exhibition at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve – “Expedition’‘ – directly evokes a topographical feature peculiar to the place where this museum was built. Through the forward-looking ideas of the great Dutch architect Jacob van Campen and the governor of Cleves, John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen, the ‘‘Springenberg’‘ in the Neuer Tiergarten was given a height of such a magnitude that it is not only a striking landmark in the lowland landscape between Kleve and Elten but also never fails to astonish visitors to Kleve and the surroundings region. The city of Kleve, which has undergone change upon change but always kept its unmistakable character, has for centuries fascinated residents and visitors alike. It is here that the stranger has always felt at home. Indeed, that’s the way the Creator wanted it: it was here, as early as the middle of the 17th century, that the aforementioned John Maurice brought together Roman sculptures and curiosities from the New World, and from Brazil in particular. Art and nature thrived here in an idyllic architectural environment. The original architecture has disappeared, as have the countless exotica has found mention in early travelogues. Old buildings disappeared and new ones took their place, like the spa complex built in the 19th century. Even “Bad Cleve” is now no more, just a memory. Joseph Beuys, a native of Kleve, used some of the spa essembly rooms for his studio during the 1950s. Towards the end of the 20th century, Walter Nikkels converted the dilapidated spa complex into a museum, allowing himself to be guided by the historical significance of the place and making a seminal contribution to the then ongoing discussion on museum architecture. The unmistakable character of the place and the respect of tradition were the starting points of a museum design distinguished by spaciousness and individuality.

The Dutch artist Marenne Welten mainly draws and paints – and with extreme cautiousness: gouaches and oil paintings with forms that are not dashed off casually but rather gingerly coaxed from the colour alone. She paints pictures that seem to come from another world, focused on the essential, without any artistic frills. 
Even just shortly after its opening in 1997, Marenne Welten had already begun to relate emotionally to the Museum Kurhaus Kleve. To begin with, it was a relationship that developed through her fascination for the architectonic structure that never seems to comprise seperate adjoining segments but always remains a composite whole through the permanent dialogue of one room with the next. In the course of time, Marenne Welten came to understand the historical significance of the place: John Maurice and his Brazilian collection, a collection that is meanwhile scattered to all four corners of the globe but nevertheless lends this place its uniqueness. Added to this are Marenne Welten’s experiences with the ever-changing exhibitions, with the ever-changing interior of the museum and with the ever so different moods and worlds evoked by the exhibited works of art. Marenne Welten’s “Interiors” only vaguely reflect the clearly structured interior architecture of the building. Much rather they reflect what Marenne Welten has seen within it. As in a dream, time stands still, and the images she creates, freed from their contexts of time and space, appear mingled in chaotic confusion. Whilst this complexity of imagery may be seen as a biography of the place, it tells us just as much about the artist, for Marenne Welten cannot free herself from what she has seen, and the things have moved her forever come to the surface in her paintings in ever new constellations. This emotional response harks back as far as her own childhood, to happenings that took place in her own life. Thus it is that fragments of fairytales appear in her paintings just as much as imagery from her own world, her appartment, her studio.

Only occasionally do certain elements detach themselves from their contect: the insects painted by Aelbert Eckhout in Brazil between the years of 1636 and 1644 – kept at the State Library in Berlin until 1945 and since then at the Library of Cracow – monopolize in their enigmatic splendour, nightmarishly oversized, the gouaches of her “Interiors”. And then we see them again, detached from every context (just as Eckhout brought them with him to Europe in his sketchbooks), on tiny canvases, alienated in terms of both scale and function, on the walls of her studio and the exhibition rooms of the museum.

Marenne Welten creates in her paintings a simultaneity that is both determined by the place of the museum and bound up with her own person. The museum’s past exhibitions and the works of the museum’s permanent collection all shine through: Paloma Varga Weisz, Joseph Beuys, The Glass Collection, Aelbert Eckhout, the mediaeval sculptures of the Rijksmuseum. Appearing like blurred silhouettes or shadows, further alienated through their colouring, are the motifs and elements of the museum’s interior. Marenne Welten’s paintings show that a museum is about images and that it is the images that make for the uniqueness of the place. Marenne Welten’s “images of memory” often vie with one another for prominence. Their complexity must make the viewer question his own experiences of the place and try in some way to bring them congruence with those of the artist. If he himself their content from his own “imaginary museum”, his access will be easy, for he is initiated. All the same, he will find it difficult to memorize Marenne Welten’s images, not least on account of the fleetingness and compexity of the motifs, which are like fragments from many dreams pieced together in a new world, the world of Marenne Welten’s oil paintings and gouaches. Marenne Welten frees herself from traditional notions: simultaneity is abolished, as is the traditional order of things, that is to say, their habitual arrangement in their original contect. The new order of things is the world that Marenne Welten explores on her “Expedition”, the world she presents as an encyclopaedia of things seen. Like any expedition, a walk through Marenne Welten’s exhibition is a veritable adventure.