The Impatience of Emma Verhulst: a Portrait
When we look at Emma Verhulst’s exhibition at PONTI we can split it into two stories/storeys, the upstairs and the downstairs, the front stage and the backstage, das ich und das es, the foreground and the background.
the up / the front / das ich / the fore
The five sizeable paintings, Portraits 1-5, are alternately featuring the artist and her longtime partner in the foreground, pitted against the background of broken insides and outside lines of a disheveled cartoon character. The portraits are comprised of screen prints and oil paint as well as over-painted, pieced together digital and riso prints on paper, mounted onto canvas - stitched together they make one big painting. The works are large for the space and in comparison to the small gallery, they seem to be pushing against the tight walls of the room as much as Emma Verhulst is pushing the limits of her own work. Layer upon layer she tries to construct and deconstruct not only painting and portrait making itself but the subjects she is depicting. If the intent of a portrait is to display the likeness and personality of its subject, she is doing her best to work around that objective/directive.
All of her upstairs subjects are masked through either a filter or a literal facial mask. Mickey Mouse - a symbol for innocence and joy but also greed and capitalism - has been gutted by the artist, dissected in Petri dishes and its intestines have been sprawled all over the canvases. Nothing happy about that anymore. The (self-)portraits are either hidden behind masks or layered on top of each other. A small, digitally distorted and riso printed photograph that conspicuously looks like a phone screen features a desperate image of the artist on a mountain of blown up insides. A zoom into the agony of that explosion. Her other half in a clownish halo absent-mindedly looking down onto broken, dangly Mickey legs. A warped alien artist on top of a made invisible partner.
There is a sense of devastation in those portraits that only lovers, close friends and family know how to excavate within each other. But as with all good drama, there is also a tragicomic element about them: maybe it's the heightened emotions that come with the “crying/sad face” filter the artist employs or the absent look in combination with a clownish facial mask on her boyfriend. It is “the same psychic pneumatics that Freud mapped out as the origin of jokes: distillation and compression. The joke work, the dream work, the art work: all of these are ways to cope. The (im-)possibilities of portraying someone so close to you as well as the interlinking co-dependencies within a relationship shimmer through the multiple layers of the paintings.
Emma Verhulst’s usual rectangular way of framing has partly been replaced by a spotlight that zooms in or highlights the literal inside or masked outside of her subjects. It is a focalizer that reminds us of the moonlight in the theatre, a look through a microscope in a laboratory or a searchlight on the highway looking for its flee(t)ing subject. The dry title of the show (portraits) stands in stark contrast to the rawness (I dare you not to say freshness) and awkwardness of her work and that's where your heart starts to sing. We love an awkward work - when others dare to be shabby and their rawness translates an emotional rationality that a most precise rendering and technical mastery struggles to do.
the back / the down / das es
Making our way down the tricky spiral staircase into the subconscious of the space, we find ourselves facing different kinds of paintings. Here the portraits are smaller, faster and remind us of Emma Verhulst’s oil pastel drawings. It is small paintings of the caves we find at the Antwerp Zoo, one of Leopold II pride projects that features a difficult history as an art nouveau jewel (as all of them) being built on the horrors of the Congo revenues. Together with the prominent train station of the city, the two buildings function simultaneously as Antwerp’s architectural flagships as well as its bad conscience. While the train station still works as the city’s arrival portal, the zoo is under constant renovation (Belgium, hello) and most of its animals have left their home for a bigger, better destination. What’s left is a gloomy atmosphere of empty cages and the remembrance of an inflated empire and ego.
The small paintings with their smudged pastel-colored brush strokes feature caves that have body- like features. Whether they are human or beastly is yet to be determined, but there is a simultaneity of the body within the architecture, or the architecture within the body. Think of the works as flip images, you squint your eyes, it could be either or, neither or both. The paintings function as mise-en-abymes within the subconscious of the gallery: they open a room within a room, a cave within a cave, a monster within a monstrosity. It could be us on the inside of the cave looking out or it’s us on the outside looking in.
Emma Verhulst wades through her subject matter like a warrior with a machete. Nothing is safe anymore. Her studio is half battleground, half construction site. She is wrecking stuff, experimenting, ripping things off, gluing things on. Scraps of photographs, loose screen-printed canvases and paper, oil pastel drawings pile up around her while she is building a house. She is literally working in piles, brick after brick, association after association, working over previous layers of paint, whatever gets it done. She is quick and impatient which in turn makes the paintings raw, sometimes shabby, sometimes awkward, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes bad – which is great. She scrapes it down and rebuilds it, it’s a battle between her, the canvas and the subject matter. And in that there is a sense of urgency in trying to shift the sense of things – to be able to beam out that “electrifyingly personal and strange signal”, we are all looking for.
Written by Michaela Schweighofer