Ouverture ancienne
Leda in white domino,
incandescent, the unashamedly glossolalic TIGERSPRUNG
(Other possible openings)
Pulls the curtain aside and enters the scene tits first.
So, as to, in the evening, retired to my couch, a snake
Hérodiade in Valentino Jeans.
“Smell my rose!” said Berin to the Princess
Sweat those syllables,
protector, protector!
I love it when you dance so low
Thee, semantic ghost of uncompleted poem
The birds are awake already!
TRACE THE PICTURE. RUB A BIRD IN THE SKY
Crown crawling serpentines
Keep up, girl
There are many bright i’s, u’s and é’s to go with this frosty passage
That time Timothy Tiger yodelled some jangling verse
Layered soft ground etch, monoprint, oil crayon, wobbly eyes on paper, heart shaped eyelets, metal frame, chains
2020/2021
Rub a bird in the sky, domino a daisy
Layered soft ground etch, monoprint, sequin elephants and pencil on paper, heart shaped eyelets, metal frame
2020/2021
(picture top: Silvia Cappellari, bottom: Chantal van Rijt)
Sun’s topless matter (O, Jokanaan)
Layered soft ground etch, monoprint, pencil, BIC, oil crayon, smiley stickers, silk rope, heart shaped eyelets on wire mesh panel with legs
2020/2021
Semantic gospel of hard d’s and T’s
Layered soft ground etch, monoprint, marker, pencil, letraset, oil crayon, heart shaped eyelets, silk rope on metal frame
Exhibition view of the group show at Fons Welters with Kerstin Brätsch, Ryo Kinoshita, Sarah Księska and Anh Trần.
Swoosh
[These nymphs I would make last. So rare Their rose lightness arches in the air, Torpid with tufted sleep. I loved: a dream? My doubt, thick with ancient night, it seems Drawn up in subtle branches, ah, that leave The true trees, proof that I alone have heaved For triumph in the roses' ideal folds. Look, perhaps ... are the women which you told Ones your mythic wishing-sense has schemed? Faun, the illusion, when the fountains teemed, Fled her cold, blue eyes - she untouched. But the second, full of sighs, say you how much Like a hot day's breath she thrilled your fleece? If not? Through this still, slack-flesh peace (…)]1
This is an excerpt from a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, presented here without line breaks. The poem is structured of complexly articulated and enjambed couplets, dense with alliteration and assonance. Undone of breaks, it moves even further into dreamlike logic.
Artist Natasja Mabesoone’s prints are borne of a fascination for Hérodiade, Mallarmé’s version of Salomé. Hérodiade is not a character in any traditional sense, but a series of connections resulting in complex signification.2 She becomes an embodiment of the multiple. In Mabesoone’s series, fragmented letter shapes and retraced curves seem to reference a desire that is transparent yet impenetrable. Her light colour patches are ethers, soaks for cryptic remnants and primitive codes, thinned out like language and memory. Pressing on the latter, the viewer is confusingly seduced by young girls’ aesthetics. Cute face stickers, a smear of lipstick and earrings pearl on top of the prints like drops of sweat.
In both Mabesoone’s etchings and Mallarmé’s writing, there is a conscious and sustained exploration of syntactic ambiguities, etymological and graphic effects, blank spaces — marks of a writing process3. All presence and void, the prints are made pressing texture into a soft, waxy ground. Each element only lets itself be printed in its actual size, they “happen” in a blind anaerobic moment of contact.
Mabesoone forwards me a passage about her thoughts in the studio. She writes in associating sways, linking figures through names and contours, to longer lines of history: “I was curious to develop some kind of tension between the damsel in distress and the belle dame sans merci. The character of Saint John transformed into the head of Lowly Worm (also nice to read about on Wikipedia, very serious description) and snakelike Js.” The prints are not unlike language bathing in a milky tub. They come out wrinkled with layers of discourse.
Text by Céline Mathieu
1 Fragment of a poem titled ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated from the French by Hope H. Glidden and Elisabeth Yaung-Bruehl
2 and 3 Fragment from ‘Eros Under Glass: Psychoanalysis and Mallarmé's Herodiade’ by Mary E. Wolf
Quartet Poortersloge, groupexhibition curated by Alice Vanderschoot
