Interval, 2023, solo exhibition at Villa Mondriaan
The exhibition consisted of several series of paintings from 2018 - 2023
 

Publication Interval, 2023
The publication 'Interval' was published on the occasion with support of the Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds and Jaap Hartenfonds
A text was written by Caro Verbeek, art historian

Looking with Your Body - Marjolein Rothman’s Longing for the Immaterial

by Caro Verbeek

 

Putting your finger on atmosphere

A subtle fruity fragrance mingles with the smell of lentil soup and paint in Marjolein Rothman’s spacious, light-filled studio when I visit her on a warm day in February. Every studio has its own atmosphere and smell, I have learnt. It reflects not only the way a person works, and their choice of materials, but also ideas and habits and, of course, specific moments. It turns out that the invigorating aroma is ‘bergamot’ [a small citrus fruit]. It immediately makes me think of the many oranges Mondrian ate in his New York workspace. The air must have been filled with the scent of oranges, plus tobacco smoke, and the smell of fresh linseed oil. Smells connect us to an environment in a very basic way, without any need for images or words, and this makes it very difficult to put your finger on it. But this is precisely what Rothman sets out to achieve in her abstract paintings. ‘When I paint flowers, for example, I don’t want to convey their visual aspect, but rather the experience of a fleeting moment.  By experience I mean, for example, how you can feel spring in the city, without the visual playing any role. It’s about light, warmth, a breeze and – indeed – smells.’

 

The space taken by emptiness

Movement is one of those immaterial things that can be evoked by images. Rothman does this by, for example, abolishing the hierarchy of foreground and background. Movement is suggested as the ‘residual form’ and the ‘main form’ shift, alternately coming to the fore. This works because all shapes in the floral compositions are in the same plane, with no suggestion of depth. Viewers can choose where to focus. Just like in the famous example of the hare that changes into a duck, simply because you change the focus of your attention (this is known as a ‘Gestalt switch’ in psychology). But the ‘intermediate space’, which is in fact invisible, also plays a role. The colours – which Rothman carefully combines – are like a harmonic interval in which the inaudible – or in this case invisible – tension manifests itself. ‘Some colours vibrate and shimmer when together. A fellow artist came here recently and actually made a noise [‘eeeehhhh’, she demonstrates] when she saw the colours cerulean blue and vermilion in Irises IX [p.24]. Those colours both attract and almost repel each other because they are slightly different in terms of their temperature and saturation. In other cases, they are so close that it would be impossible to tell them apart in a black-and-white photograph, as in Irises VIII’ [p. 25].

There is a ‘danger’ lurking here, of which Mondrian repeatedly warned. People have a tendency to see the white or unworked parts of a piece of paper or canvas as something left over as background, or something ‘around an object’. Mondrian was therefore at pains to point out that his white and grey were not ‘silence’, as opposed to the ‘sound’ of his primary colours, but rather their counterpart, ‘noise’, because there always has to be ‘something’, and even emptiness takes up space. For this same reason Rothman not only adds things, she actually removes them. By painting colours over one another and scouring them off – by way of ‘destruction’ – she conjures forms out of earlier layers. ‘A shadow can thus become material and a body or object immaterial, depending on how I apply or remove the paint.’ Often, a main form (which is thus also a residual form) owes its very existence to the paint that has been removed.

 

Capturing the ephemeral

And so the immaterial creeps in everywhere in her colourful paintings of abstracted flowers. Rothman started this series when her mother died, prompting a profound longing to capture the ephemeral. Around the same time, Rothman found something extraordinary on the street that partly determined her choice of subject. Among some waste items left for collection she found a case full of almost supernaturally coloured slides of flowers. She holds them up to the light and they glow with bright purple, vivid green, radiant yellow and a whole range of other colours, all just one shade brighter than in reality. The surrealistic colour contrasts in these Kodachrome slides immediately appealed to her. She was moved by the dedication of the person who had collected these images of plants. ‘He’d written the Latin and English names on every one by hand. It was someone’s life’s work. I didn’t want to let it just be lost, so I took inspiration from it for my new series.’

 

The fingers of the mind

Anyone reading the above might think that Rothman’s work is something you could dissect by fathoming the symbolism. But this is absolutely not what her work is or, rather, what it does. Like Mondrian, she is convinced that abstract art is not about looking at a picture. Ultimately, she is not concerned about the lines, the colours or the planes, but things that are much less tangible: the effect created by rhythm, parallels, gestures and movement. ‘People tend to be afraid of abstract art because they don’t know how to relate to it. But you can also understand abstraction with your senses and your body. You can often feel the gesture of a brushstroke, the direction of a plane.’ And in this sense her work relates to a long but often forgotten tradition in art history, a tradition with which the artists of De Stijl also identified, though this is rarely mentioned explicitly: it is the tradition of ‘kinaesthesia’, from the Greek for ‘movement’ (‘kin’) and ‘perception’ (‘aesthesis’). The ‘fathers’ of art history, men like Erwin Panofsky, Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin were quite clear about it: there are visual and haptic images which you can probe with your eyes and which you feel deep inside. Philosopher Johann Herder referred to this exceptional sensory ability that combines haptics (touch) and sight poetically as ‘fingers of the mind’.

 

Just before I leave we both stand looking at Plant X [p.8], a large vertical work in which long coloured leaves and black ‘counterforms’ dominate. Rothman repeats the centrifugal movements she used to apply the pink, blue and green. ‘I hope other people also feel this motion, that I can relate to them in that way.’ The mind not only has fingers, it has an entire body.