04 november 2022, Manuela Klerkx
Paradise Lost or Marc Mulders' imaginary garden paths
Marc Mulders' solo exhibition 'A Garden Path' opens at NQ Gallery in Antwerp on Saturday 5 November. On view are a series of new paintings in which the artist mimics the abundant nature he cherishes around his studio. With his lands in mind, he paints in blotchy textures using his brushes as if they were garden tools. An interview with the artist on the relationship between art, his garden and paradise…
MK You have been working as an artist for several decades now. What is it like to be an artist in these turbulent times, especially if you don't want to be an 'artist of the battle song' but an 'artist of ambience'? How do you accomplish that?
MM In these confusing and tumultuous times, various large groups of people are attempting to sabotage our democracy and science by deliberately choosing disruption, denial, hatred or attack. The artist can create a counter-sound – not through a battle song, but through a 'melody'. What makes art so powerful is that it can put up a fight in a whisper and offer beauty through such qualities as order, rhythm, light and colour. With tags like spirituality and mysticism – concepts normally closely intertwined with our daily lives, but which have been relegated to the periphery in recent decades – the visual arts can also serve as a safe haven. For example, we see how young artists like Lotte Wieringa, Rumcha Noorda and Agnes Waruguru, as well as also well-known artists like Monster Chadwin and Ragnar Kjartansson – thanks to the revival of Hilma af Klint – are paying more attention to the spiritual, nature and the mystery of life.
Incidentally, an exhibition can also create a meaningful ambience based on the encounter between the artists themselves and the public. I like to create exhibitions about ambience together with a fellow artist. As I did in the 1990s with artist friends from the so-called 'Tilburg School' [a group of artists consisting of Paul van Dongen, Guido Geelen, Reinoud van Vught, Ronald Zuurmond and Marc Mulders, who felt personally and artistically related to each other and found their roots in the religious, pictorial and craft legacy of 2,000 years of Christianity, Judaism and Humanism, MK] and later with exhibitions such as 'Against the light in' with Katinka Lampe at the Museum Arnhem in 2015 and the exhibition 'Mapping out Paradise' with Claudy Jongstra at the Museum De Pont in 2017. They were spherical museum exhibitions about spherical realities elsewhere.
Lastly, the stained glass craft lends itself particularly well to creating an atmosphere of light and dark: the incoming light creates a spherical palette ranging from bright to twilight and from radiant to dark, giving the subject – always connected to the moment as it were – a subjective temperature. I have always had a premonition about the twilight zone in which we now find ourselves. The stained-glass window 'The Last Judgment' at the St. John's Cathedral in 's-Hertogenbosch and the 'Apocalypse window' at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht are spherical reflections about the zeitgeist at the beginning of this century.
Marc Mulders, Sunflower 01.09.22, 2022, NQ Gallery
MK In your artist statement, you claim that 'being part of a tradition is just as important to me as originality.' Can you explain that?
MM The notion of being part of a tradition, and by extension part of a group of likeminded people such as an art academy or pop band, appeals to me. It means you are automatically connected to your predecessors. Take a band like The Rolling Stones, for instance. They are inspired by the great blues and jazz musicians who came before them, thereby placing themselves in a tradition. In the 1997 pamphlet for the Tilburg School, I mention three concepts: religion, tradition and craft – three 'suspicious' concepts within the postmodernism of those days because they express a desire to meet with likeminded people to critically examine tradition and idealistically explore the future.
MK For years you have been studying Persian miniature art, in which gardens play an important role. Where does this fascination for nature, gardens, flowers and Persian miniature art come from?
MM In the past, artists from the low countries only had two choices when it came to an adventurous inspirational journey: you could either go to Rome or to the Orient. So, in 1989, in line with expectations, as a nominee for the Prix de Rome, I went on a study trip to the Royal Netherlands Institute at the Villa Borghese in Rome. That became a voyage of discovery for me of, among others, Caravaggio and the Baroque. In recent years, I have been visiting the Orient, although virtually, but still…I have made all kinds of discoveries, such as Arab Islamic iconography and visual culture, Persian miniatures, Moorish garden culture and the mysticism of Sufism. For me, such a virtual journey is an adventure of images and an exercise for the mind. I look for similarities between the natural lyricism and mysticism of Christianity and that of Islam, in other words between the East and the West.
It doesn't matter which corner of the world your garden is in:
north or south, east or west.
Because in every garden, wherever it may be, you experience the same recognition
vnd acknowledgement of the secret of growth, flowering and wilting.
My fascination for the depiction of nature in art, especially in Western medieval manuscripts, has found its counterpart in Persian miniature art. This wonderful division of space in the paradise garden in the limitation of the rectangle through the four streams of paradise originates from the same method, beauty and genius in both Western medieval manuscripts and Persian miniature painting.
Marc Mulders, A Garden Walk (Autumn) 13.10.22, 2022, NQ Gallery
MK You have created a book full of 'selfies' as you call them, but they are in fact not 'selfies' but (self-)portraits. Where did you get the idea for such a book?
MM made my first self-portraits in the studio in the 1980s, proof of the fact that my flower, dead animals and vanitas paintings were not painted from a photograph, but from reality. The dead animals ended up in my studio via the poulterer and I ordered fresh flowers in Aalsmeer. I then plucked the pheasants, cut open the wild boar and roe deer and made tableaus of the flowers in combination with watercolours and open books by my heroes, Soutine and Rembrandt. The fact that I nailed ensembles of dead fowl to the easel and displayed the dead wild boar and roe deer wide open against the studio wall was not always believed to be real. So, when I first showed these works in New York, the public couldn't believe their eyes, because painting from a photograph was all the rage at the time.
This 'evidence', these studio pictures of the animal, flower and painter himself, often accompanied by pictures torn from art books and fashion magazines like Vogue stapled to the easel, were also a way to communicate with my collectors: with each letter, I enclosed a studio photograph in the envelope. The studio photos were also published as support material for the text in catalogues.
Taking these pictures also has a sort of ritualistic effect. Posing with the 'conquest' – on canvas, of course – also has a sense of a trophy display: while painting, the artist always derives energy from the flower or dead animal. In that sense, there is always a voodoo element in the relationship between the painter and body or object to be portrayed.
'Selfies' appeared in a small solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum The Hague in 2018 because I wanted to combine all of these photographs on the occasion of my 60th birthday. Consequently, 'Selfies' was given away as a birthday present, while supplies lasted...
MK In a 2020 interview with FD Magazine, you quote Edy de Wilde: "De Wilde told me that you should map out the emotion of life.” Do you think you have succeeded and if so, how?
MM Edy De Wilde meant that as a painter, you should not get stuck imitating only injustice and suffering. That as an artist, you also have to be able to map the emotion of life, what makes people happy... That statement inspired me to paint more 'towards the light'. I had wanted to get away from the darkness and subject matter for some time and move towards the more ethereal, meagre paint output of Helen Frankenthaler, for example, and this was a good start. Thanks in part to my conversations with Edy de Wilde and my later visit to Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, I realised that a flower bed in backlight and a ripple of water can also represent the mystery of ever-pulsating life and inspire a passionate painting.
And although in the past, I only considered a work successful if it had somewhat of a vanitas element in it, almost the opposite is true nowadays and my abstract floral paintings speak about the light, about the awakening of nature in different atmospheres.
Marc Mulders, Nocturne 05.07.22, 2022, NQ Gallery
MK What are the greatest challenges when creating a painting?
MM That the painting does not appear more important than it is. My painting is like a melody of colour, light and rhythm that reflects my nature experiences and nature views. So, it should appear calm and orderly, not forced or weighty. That is why I do not want the physical actions, so to speak, to be reflected too emphatically in the paint output, as in my earlier work.
A painting should not be conceited in advance because it may generate more money in the art market in the future.
I often paint in series because this diminishes the importance of each painting as unique, as it is part of a greater whole. Incidentally, it is challenging to constantly reflect differently within the series: for example, the sunflower as a miniature in a very small format as an intimate jewel or the largest sunflower in the field with a magnified heart, then again as part of a nocturne or in the morning sun.
With the more abstract works, I challenge myself to finish the painting within a few days because I want the linen to be tangible and sporadically visible. So, I strive for a more ethereal paint surface – with the exception of the sunflowers – and if I paint too long, the subject matter will surface and I no longer want that. If I still can't figure it out, correction after correction, the painting is doomed to fail and I eventually give up. I then remove the linen from the stretcher, put in a new canvas and start all over again. I first paint the white of the linen with an off-white with a slight colour cast, sometimes pink – for dew – then yellowish or orange – for dusk. This is how I refer to the light of the moment I observe from the stable door that opens up to the flower field. Ultimately, therein lies the greatest challenge for the future: translating spherical views of the flower field shrouded in mist, fog or dew – or in backlighting – into abstract paintings.
MK Can you mention an artist you admire and why?
MM Oh, there are so many, but I'll limit myself to these three heroes: Helen Frankenthaler, Landon Metz and Andreas Erikson. At the time of the great painter's gesture and painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning – and their battle over who was actually the greatest – there was a certain Helen Frankenthaler, a painter who withdrew from the masculine Marlboro man mentality of the tough painter and with a minimum of action and a velvet palette, unleashed a true painting revolution. It was truly revolutionary how she could create a painting without traces of hard work on the canvas – like a melody in the distance. Frankenthaler's painting technique was like watercolour painting with oil paint dripped from above onto the horizontal canvas. Her paintings are tender and charming, yet monumental and architectural, often with pastel colours combined with more earthy tones. My brushstroke always bears traces of hard work, of the painter's struggle. That is precisely why I admire painters who blow the paint across the canvas like breath. This is also the case with the American painter Landon Metz: in both Frankenthaler and Metz, the paint is not pushed forward, but blown further apart as if by magic.
What also intrigues me is that although their pastel-coloured palettes originate in the 'visual language' of the late Monet, they escape the all-too-familiar, impressionistic green-yellow palette. Frankenthaler's colour palette is a makeover of Late Impressionism to which, in the 1960s, she added new skin pigment and make-up tones: shades and gradations synonymous with fashion, but also with the atomic age of those days.
Number three on my list is Swedish painter Andreas Eriksson, whose work I discovered when he represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 2011. I noticed we have four similarities: a studio in the countryside, nature as a source of inspiration, excursions to other disciplines like tapestry and photography and the influence of electricity on our temperament. I have been painting exclusively during daylight for 10 years now and Andreas Eriksson moved to the countryside when he discovered that he was hypersensitive to electricity and therefore chose nature as a safe haven and source of inspiration. Eriksson's paintings celebrate not so much the romantic as the architectural aspects of nature, such as rock formations, clouds, vegetation and water flows, which he paints together like puzzle pieces so as to create completely new maps of nature as it were. His brushstrokes are not expressive, but highly controlled and restrained, almost mathematical. And like Van Gogh, he builds up the linen in a controlled and methodical fashion, from left to right and stroke by stroke. And once the last stroke, the finale, has been made, a beautiful chess game is revealed between the earthly and more heavenly tones.
MK What will you be showing at your next exhibition at the NQ gallery in Antwerp?
MM This exhibition is part of a diptych. The exhibition preceding this 'Hunt for Paradise' at the Kersgallery in Amsterdam featured more activist works, while in this exhibition, 'A Garden Path', I show observations rather than statements about nature. The title 'A Garden Path' refers to my work in the garden and on the flower field that serves to benefit the painting process. I sow, hoe and lay paths in the wild flower fields and then repeat these steps on the canvas: I comb the paint, meticulously glaze certain passages, while at the same time beating and 'scourging' with long brushes in order to create imaginary paths in the paint. The paths in the flower field lead to and from the two stable doors where the easel is set up. When I put down my brushes, I walk straight into 'my paradise'. I view paradise as a metaphor: on the one hand for the memory of the lost paradise and on the other, as a longing for a restoration of that same lost paradise. It is for good reason that Mary Magdalene sings in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, 'Could we start again, please?'
In addition to these 'Garden Path' paintings, the exhibition also includes a work from the 'Hunt for Paradise' exhibition and as a third component, the sunflower I began painting again last summer. The sunflower motif has a fraught history associated with Van Gogh. That's why I never dared to paint a sunflower until when in 1995, a friend asked me to paint one in A4 format for a dear friend who was in the hospital. So, I got to work with the sunflower as a long wolf and as a messenger, fragile and vulnerable. Once the spell was broken, the motif returned in 1996, 1997, 1999 and much later in 2013, following my exhibition with Erik Andriesse at the Vincent van Gogh House in Zundert.
And now, in 2022, after nine years of abstract painting, the sunflower returns – this time in my outdoor workshop on wheels created by Piet Hein Eek in a flower field full of sunflowers. The last painting in the sunflower series will be on display in the exhibition – and is more sun than flower.
Marc Mulders, Spring (Persian) 01.04.22, 2022 NQ Gallery
