Exhibition

Roxane A duo presentation with Jesse Willems at Art Antwerp is scheduled for December 2023. As the curator of that presentation, I challenged you to create large work. How’s that process going for you?

Svelte Well, you could definitely call it a challenge (laughs). Smaller pieces are more concentrated; I can focus on them more easily. Making large work always implies stepping out of my comfort zone a bit, which can be quite intimidating. However, it’s an essential journey for me as both an artist and a person. When I was studying, teachers and the jury often questioned why I stuck to creating smaller pieces. Well, because it’s where I feel most at ease! I often find larger pieces to be weighty in terms of content, and I’m occasionally taken aback by the kind of imagery they generate. But I always learn a great deal from them! The visual solutions I discover are entirely different from those in my smaller works. Earlier this year, I visited the joint exhibition of Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Mitchell’s work left me utterly speechless. It was both monumental and incredibly sincere. Fascinating! In the studio, I frequently flip through her catalogue when working on a larger scale feels difficult.

Roxane We intended to juxtapose Jesse’s rather understated, white paper collages with your vibrant paintings, rich in subject matter. Will they all be paintings, or are we bringing drawings to the exhibition?

Svelte I did indeed opt for creating paintings. However, now that I’m facing these expansive canvases, 
I find myself frequently starting with drawings. There are just too many ideas racing through my mind simultaneously. It’s a bit like the piece Verlegen wolkje (‘Shy Cloud’), with various layers stacked on top of each other. It’s easier for me, then, to think while I’m drawing. This is largely due to the swiftness of drawing. Consequently, in the studio, to capture my creative process, 
I display multiple drawings and sheets of paper with scribbled words above, below, and alongside my paintings.

Roxane Your drawings possess a disarming beauty and a moving sincerity. They resonate strongly with the viewer.

Svelte Drawings are undeniably more direct and pure. The speed with which they are created, among other things, leaves no room for a filter. In contrast, paintings entail a certain sense of waiting, which creates a degree of distance. And the multitude of layers superimposed upon each other results in a somewhat filtered image.

Roxane During our first encounter, your works not only represented a refreshing exploration of painting, its visual language, and its boundaries, but also zoomed in on the landscapes of your childhood. More precisely, the pristine natural surroundings along the Grote Nete in your hometown of Itegem (a sub-municipality of Heist-op-den-Berg). Later, you moved to a studio in the heart of Antwerp, and a noticeable evolution became apparent in your work. Your usually abstract paintings were cut by a vibrating play of lines. Was this a response to processing the multitude of sensory stimuli you encountered in the city?

Svelte Yes. In the countryside, with its unhurried rhythm, time is abundant. There’s time to exist in and with time. There is time, but also space to think. In Itegem, I was often sitting along the chickens, seeking understanding. In the city, there’s no room for ‘understanding’. Every space is occupied, and everything is pre-digested. Consequently, my work in the city became less ‘thought-through’, and more an intuitive understanding of the environment I was living in. The vibrating lines are like the echoes of urban sounds.

Roxane We’re talking about vibrations and sounds. Can we say that you incorporate synesthesia into your paintings?

Svelte Yes, synesthesia is a term that’s often used by people when describing my work. This summer, I reacquainted myself with the works of the Swedish composer Hans Appelqvist (Tänk att himlens alla stjärnor). In his music, he blends singing with various little sounds, as if they suddenly breezed in. It triggered me to attempt to visually represent music, resulting in Pluisbloemen. That painting perfectly visualises my summertime sensation with its twinkling sounds (laughs). When I think of sound and music, I also think of colour, motion, and structure. I see my works as orchestras comprising double basses, violins, and tubas.

Roxane Your work is highly context-specific, influenced by the countryside, the city, the seasons…

Svelte Yes, my use of colour naturally adapts to the seasons, almost without my conscious intention. I tend to use colours mixed with white in the spring, and plenty of yellow and pink during the summer. In autumn, khaki green takes the stage, and in the winter there are more intense hues. Summer brings more light and people dance, causing my paintings to light up and capture a lot of movement. In autumn, the mist rises, and darkness looms in the wintertime. It was around this time last year, in October 2022, when I created a large, black painting for the first time.

Roxane Engaging directly with life, with what you observe, experience, and feel. In our earlier conversation, you mentioned your approach to conveying emotions – not in a concrete manner, but rather as suggestions or echoes. You referred to them as “abstract emotions”, inspired by Canadian-American abstract painter Agnes Martin, inexpressible emotions that often emerge when you’re observing nature.

Svelte In general, it often takes me some time to articulate or represent things, let alone for my work to become a precise depiction of something concrete. My paintings are always a sort of ‘journey towards’, a quest for something that I can’t immediately grasp, something I can almost see, though simultaneously it seems distant and blurry. This is reflected in multiple layers of thick matter. At the moment even more so, because I’m currently in some kind of transitional phase. I’m set to return to the countryside in December. My boyfriend and I bought a house, again in Heist-op-den-Berg, but on the other side. I now find myself somewhere in between: no longer in the urban studio, yet not quite at the countryside. It’s like I’m in a dream, with my gaze fixed on the weeping willow, the birds, and the chickens waiting for me in Heist-op-den-Berg. But at the same time, it feels like I’m in a dense fog or a swimming pool where you have to try real hard to push aside the heavy water. This creates a surprising confusion in my work, and casts a kind of haze, like a curtain, over the ‘actual’ image.

Roxane But will the landscape of your childhood, the Grote Nete and ‘the meadow’, soon emerge again from that mist?

Svelte Yes, it is only a twenty-minute bike ride from our new house to the Grote Nete, and I also have an outdoor studio there. In that sense, I am returning to my starting point as a painter, and that feels very nice. Just like my parents, we also have a weeping willow in the garden. I look at it from my studio. When a weeping willow loses its leaves in autumn, it is not bald but its branches appear to have little hairs. When the sun shines on it, that lush head of hair takes on a golden glow. I’m looking forward to discovering how that translates into my work!