Gabriëlla Cleuren

Written in 2020: 

These are works that capture memory, the memory of everyday life. It may sometimes seem mundane, fascinating, extreme, unsettling or poetic, but it is part of life. What is art, if not an attempt to engage the viewer through the image?

Since memory is always coloured by personal experience and is often imprecise and free, I employ a great freedom of form in this series of works, which at times may seem unskilled or flawed, even childlike. That is the charm of the work, its unpretentiousness. Here, it is the means of giving form to the uniqueness of memory.

In addition, for this series, in keeping with our computer age: communicating through pictograms, I have also designed my own pictograms which appear in the work for clarification.  So I can tell a story purely through pictograms. But usually it is a combination of past observations supplemented with pictograms. The fact that it is depicted here in a very personal way makes the work highly authentic and unmistakable.

Written in 2014: 

My work arose from a need to capture my ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ in time, to leave a trail, with life itself as the ceaseless, driving force. A RESISTANCE TO TRANSITORY NATURE, whilst simultaneously evoking vulnerability in its imperfect form.
I always work from recent memory because this  gives shape to a very  personal authenticity, in a unique, free, imagined form, sometimes poetic, unrealistically real.

The content seeps involuntarily through the many layers and thus conveys its meaning: unconsciously.

This leads to unprecedented images and is as inexhaustible as life itself, reflecting our times in their multitude: the collage form for a single image, as life imposes itself today, a distinct world of its own, in which viewers recognise parallel experiences, that which people share and which connects them.

Written in 2011: 

These works are written memories of events from my life or life in general, occurrences, reflections, confrontations with others and what emerged in their lives that holds universal human value. The surroundings are often taken as a backdrop, the figure embedded in its environment, which can be highly meaningful. The form I employ is distinctive: lyrical, a poetic form, a painted collage. The difficulty lies in the virtual nature of the work and in appealing to the viewer’s feelings and imagination to make the right connections from the multitude of elements and to interpret the intended meaning. The viewer is free to interpret it in their own way.

A straightforward image says what it says. Mine requires greater effort from the viewer: reading, feeling, interpreting.

It is a painted poem, a tapestry of multiplicity, of the simultaneity of interrelationships: a meaningful whole. The virtual aspect is a completely free form and composition, chosen as a free expression of what is important to me: reality in the language of the imagination. Everything unfolds in such a virtual manner. But is not life itself just like that?

Written in 2007:

The captured images of a life’s journey, recorded traces of an existence, often written down as a counterpoint, give meaning to the meaninglessness of existence. A probing of memory and inner life.

They have woven the script of our time, in  free, self-invented pictograms, into an organic whole; chaotic,  spontaneously written,  they bear witness to a fragmentation of life with which we are  confronted in this age. The story contains a vast amount of information, of feelings and life’s course, readable only indirectly: a solitary conversation.

The whole has emerged organically and bears witness to the fact that a human being functions as a part of the greater whole, and nothing more. The human being as a tree, which does not influence the growth of its branches and leaves. They simply come into being.

Often, this world has little to do with what we see, but rather with the perception of it and introspection, captured in a visual dialogue with the outside world or which can also be seen as a  soliloquy. They are images of isolation: universal, images  as the flip side of the extreme individualism of our times.

Written in 2005:

My paintings can be seen as an exploration of tracing reality within the virtual.

In concrete terms, it involves a classical medium: applying paint to a surface, telling a story in two dimensions. What makes it unique is the language I have developed for this purpose. Form and colour are not bound by any rules and possess a specific mode of expression.

The images can never be interpreted in a straightforward manner. Their meaning reveals itself between the lines, much like a child who, following a trauma, exposes reality through drawings.

My work captures a trace of life, recording important and seemingly trivial events on an almost daily basis.  It thus forms a virtual reality of thoughts, sometimes mingled with dreams, fears,  observations from the ‘Umfeld’. For me, it is a way of  capturing the ‘I’ and its relationship with the outside world, bearing witness to an  existence in the 21st century. Life is a powerful source.

From a multitude, a residue filters through.

I often use pictograms for this, which I have developed into a personal alphabet: simple, universal, sometimes cryptic.

A few examples:

The curtain represents the opening of the world theatre and how life unfolds behind it. The mouth stands for speaking, communication, contact, or crossed to signify silence, loneliness, stillness. The ear or ears refer to good sounds (birds, the wind) or bad sounds (noise pollution). The semicircle on the head symbolises thought when blue. Red, on the other hand, with ‘swinging’ movements, represents emotions. The bed or sleeping stands for the familiar, a sense of security. ‘The path’, the journey to be undertaken in life, and ‘the act of walking’ are depicted in footprints. To walk is to live.

The design has been deliberately kept free. Colour is often psychologically charged. This enables me to capture all aspects of life and allow them to flow, move and be absorbed into the appropriate images.

Written in 2004 :

The artist’s own world, which springs from the reality of his life, is given form here. Just as, upon entering, the photo-sculpture has been very deliberately taken as a starting point to convey a better understanding of the origin of this personal world, so here passers-by have used the tree as a medium  to leave their feelings, their names, a wound, a mark as traces of their existence, which have taken on a life of their own, fused into a changeable, harmonious work in a completely natural way; in this way I preserve traces of my life and chart them.
In an almost natural way, linked to thinking about, thinking of, dreaming, memory, desire, fear, conscious perception, sorrow and joy – all those cosmic impulses that bubble up within a person, like the growths on a tree – cast into brief pictograms and spontaneous forms, as on the tree bark below; this is how this work comes into being.
A symbiosis of realities that provide impulses for ideas and become a world of their own, a virtual world. The driving force is always life itself, which retrospectively  assembles a coincidental whole in an image, as on the tree bark below, and subsequently sets processes of awareness in motion.

Initially arising from an attempt to fill the void of loneliness with beings, they have become figures that embody a wisdom of life, a state of awareness, a conversation.

Just as the parallels below between photography and metal prompted me to translate these traces into a different material—with the associated realisation that wounds are also openings and often bring perspective or renewal in life—this work is inspired by nature: abstract, yet also giving rise to symbolism. I also see myself as a part of nature that functions like everything within it, and in the same way, this entirely free work must be understood as a burst of life, albeit sometimes linked to reflections that often only become clear in hindsight.

These virtual worlds spring from the reality of life.

As a symbiosis of memory, desire, conscious perception and feeling, they are cast in a completely free, often pictographic form.

The free form is deliberately employed here to chart the simultaneity of human functioning across different planes.

They are the reality of the mind, transformed, coloured by reality from within, a world of memory and thought that races by and is just as real as the outside world.

Thought as an image of the workings of the mind, often assembled in fragments.