I Cavalieri dell'arte sfogliabile

who’s who in visual art. Art Domain
La estetica y el arte contemporaneo. Atcultura
2007
SEETAL
Paintings by Jette van der Lende: Whispers in an empty amphitheater (2007)
Jette van der Lende’s realistic oils have the preternatural capacity to stop time.
Or at least slow time down. In his novel Slowness Milan Kundera writes: “A
word uttered in a small enclosed space has a different meaning from the same
word resonating in an amphitheater. No longer is it a word for which he holds
full responsibility and which is addressed exclusively to the partner, it is a
word that other people demand to hear, people who are there, looking at them.
True the amphitheater is empty, but even though it is empty, the audience,
imagined and imaginary, potential and virtual, is there, is with them.” With
van der Lende the scale of the works may be small and yet we as viewers seem
to be witnessing the birth of something special, an object caught in a cat’s
cradle of relations (optical and mental) with other objects and the space that
envelops them. This artist has the uncanny ability to create visionary work
that intimates the sacred souls and sacred lives of the circumstances of objects
in the world.
The lucidity and control through which Jette van der Lende paints her
seemingly modest objects and spaces create a deeply saturating auratic
experience for the viewer. What might this aura cling to? It is clearly given
over to the sensed experience of the artist. This experience triangulates
between several aspects of creative activity of giving form and then giving life
to form. The first aspect under scrutiny are her mental, ideational and
ideological responses to the object or objects she depicts (their representation) as
signifieds. Next are her sensations that are given form through the handling of
her paint along the surface of her pictorial plane, including the layering and
feathering of her colored brush strokes, the compositional structure, the
balancing of hues and shadows. Finally one might consider the third aspect her
emotional responses to her self, her mental condition and psychic disposition as
she pictorially refers to her subjects as signifiers. This aspect of her vision takes
into account the correspondences that are made as the artist begins and ends
the activity of painting. Call this the Mallarmean aspect (we are referring here
to the poet’s injunction to describe not the thing but the effect of the thing on
the mind). The end result of course is the object that we as viewers see in its
completed form, the finished painting.
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