“Dark paintings, theatrical installations, magical and dystopian, but also light and full of hope: that’s Eveline Visser’s oeuvre. Her art is comprehensive, both literally and figuratively. Literally, since Visser has been extending her paintings on to the rooms in which they are displayed, enabling visitors to wander around in them. The walls and ceilings have been incorporated into the paintings, giving them a monumental scale with a matching appearance. Her work is comprehensive in a figurative sense as well as it deals with serious issues: heaven and hell, war and peace, the human condition, the danger of language being deceptive, the eternal human quest for knowledge. She works on the belief that it is impossible to categorise, pigeonhole or schematise the world. That complexity makes her art timelessly relevant.
Her art often involves gravity, but there are also sparks of hopes that always add some kind of flamboyance. The dark shapes that she builds and paints ascend and discover new spaces. Like spaceships they float towards unknown vistas. On the one hand these dreamworlds are reminiscent of ancient baroque art, on the other hand they remind you of movies, especially the science fiction ones in which unlikely planets doom. Or the new universe is the metaverse in which life exists in “the cloud” only, which she translates literally into architectural cloud – palaces we can move into.
The dynamics in these visual stories are based on major contradictions such as chaos and order, which has been a central theme in her work since the seventies. Those contradictions result in complex artistic struggles, which eventually lead to art that looks effortless and therefore obvious. Each new work is created according to a somewhat premeditated plan, but while working on it, new questions arise which need new answers.
She has been working in this way for fifty years on an oeuvre with a recognizable style of her own, clearly consistent, and still it feels new when you look at it now. Or rather, it feels timeless. That can only be achieved by artists with a visual language of their own, who don’t care too much about current trends and manage to find new ways again and again within their self- created framework.
Eveline Visser does just that. Her art is entirely without compromise, it starts from large gestures with paint and torn off pieces of cardboard, which may seem casual, but aren’t. Because although she sets up her works with broad brush strokes, she always ends up completing them with a minute precision: looking for spots that need some detail, where the paint has to be translucent or opaque, where the scene should remain limited to depiction in paint or expand into sculptural clouds, doors, spaces. For this she uses ink, chalk, paint and collages of pictures which she blows up to the point of abstraction.
She creates worlds that unfold like theatre wings, inviting their viewers into war, hell, purgatory. These are serious issues, but there is always an escape route. Even when she’s depicting hell, redemption is near, and there is a way out to a heaven made up from an abundance of paint and material where it is plain to see that life is good.”
– Sandra Smets, 2022
