‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’, Shakespeare famously said, and art, especially visual art, can often be seen as an exploration of the dream side of humanity. Between 3 June and 12 November 2023, the Konschthal gallery in Esch-sur-Alzette is home to an exhibition of remarkable canvases by the Luxembourg-born, Brussels-based artist Tina Gillen, paintings which transport the viewer into a dream world that nonetheless has its basis in reality. The exhibition is named ‘Flying Mercury’, after the messenger of the gods who symbolises the free-floating imagination. An informative and well-written illustrated leaflet is available, in French and English versions.
These are not abstract paintings, for they typically have a clear referent. The dominant genre (there are also flora and dwellings…) is landscape, a pictorial mode that exercises a universal appeal. However, these are not realist landscapes in the tradition of a Constable: a possible antecedent might be the emotionally charged landscapes of the German Expressionists. The official leaflet puts it in a nutshell: ‘These conceptions navigate between abstraction and figuration’. The forms evoked are familiar from the material world but transformed into dream images, as if caught at the moment when the real mutates into the oneiric.
Many of the paintings embody physical sensations which are also emotional, such as heat and cold. A whole sequence represents different degrees of heat, even to the point of suggesting the interior of the sun. Another group expresses extremes of cold, through the eloquent image of the iceberg. The drifting floe manifests as an image of solitude: the maritime melancholy has its parallel in contemporary literature, recalling the equation of ocean and solitude in the moving stage play ‘I Am the Wind’ by this year’s Nobel laureate, the Norwegian Jon Fosse. Other works again superpose different levels of representation: in one canvas, a more realist foreground is connected to a less realist background by the flight of a darkly articulated raven. Another canvas, entitled ‘Shelter’, depicts what appears to be a typical dwelling from the small-town USA à la Hopper, but with a starkness that is not of waking life, here too evoking a deep sense of solitude.
The exhibition space is ample, generous enough to enable the visitor to absorb the paintings at a relaxed pace, and to contrast with calm the different elements in a given series. These are paintings that repay close attention, and it is to be hoped that through this exhibition Tina Gillen‘s work will both maintain its existing prestige and attract new followers.
For the venue’s site, see: www.konschthal.lu
Dr Christopher Rollason: BILINGUAL CULTURE BLOG - ENGLISH/SPANISH - CASTELLANO/INGLÉS 