MARCELLE HANSELAAR
BITING THE BULLET
23RD OCTOBER UNTIL 13TH NOVEMBER

Introduction

Figurative art can do two things: it can tell a story or create a presence. The first we call narrative art; the second has no name. But if the first is close to theatre, the second is closer to poetry, its nature being
essentially contemplative.

Hanselaar’s earlier paintings were theatrical, complete with costumes, props and performing animals, but her recent work has veered towards the poetic. Its subject matter, she recognises, is quite slight: “All the weight is in the mode of the figure - it’s really the presence of the person, the skin.”

A feel for flesh is something we associate with northern European art, a tradition to which Hanselaar, born in Rotterdam, belongs. But as a woman she has her own approach to nudity, giving its historically male perspective a sometimes disturbingly female twist.

Despite their provocative poses, Hanselaar’s female nudes are not about sex. The twisted hips of ‘La Grande Horizontale’ may recall the sexual contortionism of Picasso; the bathing beauty in ‘Spectators’ may follow a line of Susannas and Bathshebas; and the nude draped over the ‘Bed of Nails’ may echo Fuseli’s The Nightmare - minus incubus - but the titillation factor is completely absent. Hanselaar’s women aren’t sending out the usual signals. Their bodies may suggest availability, but their nervous hands and challenging expressions suggest otherwise. Theirs is a solitary eroticism: they are comfortable in their skin (even when, as in ‘Hairy Beauty’, it sprouts hairs in all the wrong places) but they are alone in it.

Even the child-woman in ‘Afraid of the Dark 3’ seems less disturbed by the enveloping darkness than by the light that intrudes on her privacy.

If Hanselaar’s women are self-absorbed, her men are even more so. ‘Warrior 1’ wears the accusatory stare of a person looking out of a MISSING poster – lost but not necessarily wanting to be found. The male nude recently entered her repertoire after a break-up made her aware of how little knowledge women have of men beyond their own desires. What does your partner do when the music stops? The men in her pictures, often young and rather feminine, have “a stillness which is not very masculine,” she admits. Like her single women, they take up defensive positions: both, in their different ways, are biting the bullet. One male nude faces ‘That Inevitable Moment 3’ with his thumb casually hooked through his barbed wire belt. Her portrait subjects, too, seem to await development as their images take shape through the veils of paint.

After the stillness of the paintings, Hanselaar’s new prints burst upon us like a carnival passing through. With each new etching series, the action becomes more furious and the cast of characters more bizarre. ‘Ways of the World’ adds shadowy homburg-hatted men and burka-clad women to the tarty temptresses and bemused animals of former series. Graphic ideas tend to come to Hanselaar in the middle of the night; only half-processed by the conscious mind, they retain the wild inconsequence of dreams. Her prints are a
ribald theatre of the absurd, while her paintings offer a sensual space for contemplation.

Laura Gascoigne