Esther Tielmans
Friday, 1 March 2013
Work from her oeuvre.
“Esther Tielemans has expanded the very concept of a landscape, culminating in installations of monumental dimensions such as the one she created at Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum on the invitation of Lily van der Stokker. From 2003 until today remarks Wilma Süto about Tieleman’s work, “painting as a medium has gradually evolved into a screen of reflections. (…) We sway along in an amazing pendulum-like movement on both sides of the surface of the water and the horizon, nature and culture, figurative and abstract, fake and real”. [1] Esther Tielemans alludes to the imposing landscapes of North America (the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico), where the stainless “beauty” of nature can induce a disturbing state of solitude. The painting becomes a panorama, a skyline. Groups of glossy coloured panels appear to float in front of the wall. Some of the wood panels on which the paintings are done attain the dimensions of walls arranged in space on the human scale. The nexus with nature and the outer world is inverted in the conception of inner space. And there are some hints of an explanation for this. At the start of the present decade, a number of Tielemans’ paintings were materially incorporated into installations that also included diverse objects. They gradually became “object-paintings”, on the frontier of “design”, and the represented space no longer had anything more than a distant connection to the reality of a landscape. At present Esther Tielemans’ paintings, whatever their size, are wholly shorn of scale. They seem, in fact, to float in weightlessness. Here is a theatrical experience. The exact reflection of a mental space whose deployment is only just beginning.” – Bernard Zürcher