Essay by Laura Gascoigne on The Weight of smoke, 2007

Contradictions which form a unity Laura Gascoigne “My way to continue in this nonsense world is to create the illusion of sense through painting,” said Anselm Kiefer in a recent interview.

Marcelle Hanselaar puts it another way when she says: “In painting, contradictions which we feel are mutually exclusive form a unity”.

To the rationalist such an attitude is illogical, but it gives the artist a special sort of detachment. Rembrandt can paint his own personal tragedy without tears of self-pity streaming down his face; Hanselaar shares her great compatriot’s ability to stand inside her own experience and view its inherent contradictions with a cool analytical eye. She also shares his fondness for theatrical illusion, “because there is the possibility to create within this illusion an immediate and intimate reality”.

For Hanselaar, as for early religious artists, painting is a way of trying to indicate the unspeakable. So it has to start by debunking the secular myth that reality is the single, indivisible, concrete whole it appears to be on the surface. Hanselaar sets out to “slice this apparently solid reality in very thin strips” and fan out the strips like playing cards on a table, so as to give a simultaneous overview of the contradictions contained in a single hand.

The awareness of simultaneity she wants to awaken is very similar to sexual exposure – which is why, at first sight, her pictures appear to be about sex. But that same awareness, applied to the self, can provoke laughter, which is why they’re often spiked with wicked humour.

It’s like a comic strip, every frame goes a bit further In a painting tradition historically framed by men, finding new ways to represent the feminine is a dangerous adventure. Hanselaar is like a child exploring a dark attic, daring herself to go one step further every time. As a consequence, she often paints in serie: “An image makes me prick up my ears and off I go, following that scent under bushes or into dark smelly places”.

Hanselaar’s pictures can be funny, like a comic strip. They can also be edgy and frightening because, like all humour, they deal with fear. Their subjects are not the things about women that frighten men – the things Munch painted - but the things about women that frighten women.

Hanselaar’s women put a brave face on it, but inside they’re quaking. Her Femme a L’Aise, in her chic green dress, sits on a bed of nails; her Woman with Impeccable Manners has perfect ringlets tied with yellow ribbons, but is desperately holding down a grinning monkey that wriggles in her lap.

Lickability is essential Hanselaar’s art is sensual, but the sensuality is not necessarily identified with the female form – in fact, the two seem to have suffered a personality split. Her female figures are left standing there, often naked, while their sensuality migrates elsewhere in the picture - into the accessories, the props, and of course the paint. Instead of being embodied in female flesh, the feminine is represented by the see-through material of a tule dress worn by a dog. In 17th century painting, such diaphanous stuff would be used to enhance the beauty of a woman’s skin, but Hanselaar’s brush finds a perverse pleasure in the look of gauzy fabric against fur. It’s a thin disguise for “the beast within us, howling and preening”.

We are naked and our animal side is dressed up “I love the passive mass of weight when a woman is just sort of standing there” Hanselaar says. Her female models don’t fit the standard male fantasy because they’re not sex objects, they’re sex subjects. She’s not so interested in the way they look as the way they feel. And the way they feel can be fierce, but also touching.

Net curtains give an air of civilisation that a house is lived in by decent people Net curtains also twitch. There’s something twitchy, too, in the other veneers of civilisation that Hanselaar’s female characters adopt: the silky flesh-pink charmeuse slips that mimic flesh, the gashes of bright pink lipstick that mimic lips. Disguised as themselves, her female characters

resemble women dressed up in female drag. They’re playing a part, and to see how they feel inside we have to look for clues elsewhere in the picture.

Colanders look like they contain something, and they don’t Hanselaar’s women feel every shade of emotion. Sometimes they feel defensive, and clutch a pillow. Sometimes they feel victorious, and climb out of dog skins. Sometimes they feel manipulative and squat naked on the floor, baiting dogs that shelter behind net curtains. Sometimes they feel constrained, like the nude Yes and No girl parcelled with string.

Sometimes, like the other adolescent seated on an examination table beside a colander, they’re just Waiting for Something to Happen. Sometimes they’d like to stop anything from happening by sewing themselves up with a needle and thread, as in the etching cycle La Petite Mort. And sometimes, no matter how hard they try to hold them in, their true feelings burst out, as in Self-portrait with Exploding Chest.

I love volcanoes, they’re so secretive: a hole in the earth where the inside is coming out continuously Where does the imagery in Hanselaar’s pictures come from? From things seen on her travels, like Stromboli erupting behind Armchair Traveller.

From things seen in films, like the latex gloves from Mona Lisa gesturing emptily behind the pillow-clutching woman in Sans Paroles 2. From found things, like a discarded colander, and things that appear unannounced in her studio, like the blackbird that wandered in one day from the courtyard, made itself at home and then vanished – to reappear in a flaming cage in 5 O’clock in the Afternoon.

Over the years Hanselaar, like all artists, has developed a personal iconography, a shorthand language of colanders, birds, apes, dogs, transparent fabrics, constricted flesh and curtains. The new series Under My Skin began as a study of three ingredients: a person, an animal and an object. “Like in Sartre’s Huis Clos, if you put three people in an empty room and lock the door, something is bound to happen”.

In a way I get more and more classical Some pictures start in the classical manner, from other pictures. Trophy Wife was inspired by Lucas Cranach’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, the woman in the checked sarong in Under My Skin 1 by Gauguin and the girl on the examination table by Munch. The beautiful Shadow of a Grey

Hat is based on Rembrandt. Hanselaar continues to test her technical limits, without feeling the need for realism. “My images look unreal,” she writes about La Petite Mort, “but they actually show us an under-the-skin reality.” In French ‘la petite mort’ means ‘orgasm’, but Hanselaar uses it to refer to “those daily small deaths we die out of longing for what we cannot ever get”.

Weighing smoke Hanselaar chose the title The Weight of Smoke for this show because the story reminded her of the impossible request, ‘Show me how much you love me’. “We’re always looking for a clever way to grasp or measure things, hoping that if we could everything would fall beautifully into place, but we always come back to contradictions. Even in painting, you’re always trying to define your own work, yet the whole value is that you can’t really weigh it.” In the past, she says, she felt her work had to say something: “Now I’m just painting.” She’s also trying to teach “a new generation of blackbirds that don’t know the rules that they can come into the studio and get out safely”.

Laura Gascoigne, London 2007