I Cavalieri dell'arte sfogliabile

The tri-partite activity, in unison, creates the artist’s sense experience which in
turn creates the auratic condition under which we are moved by the painting’s
presence. In Jette van der Lende’s case what the artist paints and how she
paints conspires to create an experience that suggests the secret lives and the
sacred souls of objects becoming manifest in time. Van der Lende is one of these
surpassingly gifted visual creators who achieve a high level of distinction in
creative terms: in a deliberative way she suggests the ongoing passing of life.
Her paintings (particularly in her Georges de la Tour-like atmospheric works
that appear to be lit from a single source) one senses flux as well as serenity.
The viewer is transfixed by the intimation of the flowing of each moment
saturating as flows the contours of her depicted objects and the spaces that
berth them. Getting immersed and enmeshed in this artist’s work involves a
reflection on what came to pass in the works’s coming-to-be. The artist’s
painting experience incorporates her tracking of her “small sensations” (to
swipe a phrase out of the Matissean notebook for a moment). Once this is done
to her satisfaction she arrives at the culminating moment, the designated
terminus point which signals the painting’s completion.
With her assertion on the ephemerally of the moment being recorded with such
fidelity through her gossamer sense of light (natural light and the light of the
sun, but also the light of fire’s embers…) it is no wonder that while the subjects
of her work are varied: (for example, Three Blocks (2004) The Spirit of Freedom
(2005), Protection Against Lies (2005), The Soul of Flower Death (2005)) van der
Lende’s vision remains inviolate and pure. She speaks to us in a large
amphitheater about small things but in a large way. And we are alone with
her in this gigantic mental setting as she starts the wheels of consciousness
turning. The presence of an intimate immensity saturates this artist modestly
sized, yet exponentially loaded artworks. They convey a deeply felt and deeply
held emotional experience. This is all the more so because of the memento-mori
aspect of the work. The irrevocability and undeniability of time’s passing is
foremost and center in the artist’s mind as she depicts her objects. In this
respect Van der Lende’s capacity to mimetically re-present the world through
her chosen visual vignettes is haunting and bracing. Life is Protected, for
example, a recent oil that showcases the depiction of an egg as a glowing orb
next to a fragment of a cracked white shell, brings everything home: the proof
of internal strength is the capacity to be, to co-exist, with our vulnerability.
Jette van der Lende creates slow artworks that bespeak of great things in
intimate detail. Her artworks serve as mirrors to us, reflecting timeless
internal configurations of the self, imitating in some manner models in an
external world, but also proudly defining the mirror as if only subservient to
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