reviews ellen de meutter
ellen de meutter:
The dozen or so acrylic, ink and oil paintings on
canvas in Belgian artist Ellen De Meutter’s first solo
secrets And lies
show in the United States furthers the burgeoning
impact of Western and Central European practice in
roberts & tilton, los Angeles contemporary figurative art. Her shamelessly heavy
17 novem ber – 2 februAry drawing style and the optical vibrato of her dissonant
colours combine with a compelling symbolic lexicon
to generate images that are throbbing with fraught psychological tension, yet balletic in their
engineering of composite narratives. Like a cartoonish take on the Leipzig School, a feminine
but muscular take on Kandinsky’s Blue Rider mountain paintings, De Meutter channels the sure
handed explosiveness of German Expressionism and even a bit of Fauvism as she coordinates
shapes of different scales on different planes. In major works like Wasserschutzgebiet (all
works 2007), her rendition of an imposing yellow mountain, with the pistachio and lavender
highlights, relates the destruction of life’s frantic tumult at the bottom in the form of black line-
work describing the ruined, messy interior of her studio. This heft gives way as the viewer’s eyes
are slowly raised up the multicoloured slopes to the heavens. Wasserschutzgebiet in particular
shows off her skill at simultaneously shifting, tearing down and building up compositions, so that
while they eventually emerge coherent and lavishly, specifically detailed, one has the feeling
of having witnessed something being born right in front of one’s eyes. The visceral sketchiness
of her palette and mark-making, every stroke embossed into the canvas, leaving streaks inside
the pigment, might as well be finger-painting. The paintings resolve themselves like a butterfly
breaking its cocoon; wet sticky awkward struggle, then a flight of sudden grace.
Something to Look Forward To, 2007, acrylic,
ink and oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm.
De Meutter’s use of text as an element of both communication and composition (as with
Courtesy roberts & tilton, los Angeles,
and tim van laere gallery, Antwerp works in which words like ‘lost’, ‘truth’ and ‘secrets’ and ‘lies’ are flung up a tree, stomped to a pulp
like grapes for wine and branded on a pair of gossips,
respectively) break across the levels of the layered
picture planes yet help tether the instances of more
abstract symbols to the representational realm. She
favours mountains, gardens and houses, but also black
Xs, slides and ladders; and the use of text helps clue her
viewers in to the metaphorical readings she intends.
There’s anger in her brushwork, but also a meditative
quality, with the slathering, the remembering and
the evoking in her work all conflated. Another major
painting from the series, Goodbye, draws together a
scene of a limp garden hose, ski goggles and boots,
a squat building, a rickety slide and a sudden burst of
bright pink over a curling snaky red line that both gives
life to the scene and underlines its symbolic import by
being completely nonreferential except to the artist’s
state of mind and poetic licence. De Meutter gets her
story out without letting her audiences forget about
the intervention of her hand. Shana Nys Dambrot
157 Artreview
march_REVIEWS.indd 157 5/2/08 13:50:55
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