Essay by Willem Elias on The Weight of smoke, 2007

Marcelle Hanselaar shines a light into the darkness of our forbidden dreams Willem Elias, professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Chairman of The Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK).

Marcelle Hanselaar’s work makes me question the specificity of her chosen media: brush and paint or etching plate and nitric acid. Her images are so narrative that it is all too easy to imagine they are the illustrations to a perverse adult fairy tale, with accompanying misery.

Offering barely any protest, Little Red Riding Hood, fearful and lustful, allows herself to be eaten out by a randy wolf and implores him not to tell her grandma, or some such.

But these are not illustrations. Hanselaar’s work is too intense, too concentrated, too explosive for that. Illustrations clarify the text; they elucidate it. That they were historically known as ‘illuminations’ says it all. They serve legibility by furnishing a resting place for the reader’s eye. Their aim is to provide breathing spaces among the words and thus to make a book more light-hearted. Hanselaar’s work is not suited to this purpose. It is oppressive and makes us ill at ease. It disturbs the peace. It does not elucidate a text, but brings us face to face with our own dark, blind spots. And this is already an answer to the why she has chosen painting as a medium.

With its narrative linearity, a text usually affords us a sense of security. Through descriptions and explanations we eventually reach understanding. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. All’s well that ends well. Or not. Now, I know that this phrase is at odds with the experimental achievements of new writing, but even the latter – like every form of language – gives us something to hold on to precisely because it constructs a story in time. The pictorial image does not do this, but instead creates a timeless space. What comes before or after is mere suggestion and allusion. There are no pages to be turned. No book to be closed. This is why the image fascinates. Even if you cannot grasp it, it grasps you. It runs wild in the playground of your imagination.

Marcelle Hanselaar has developed an individual style and chosen her own mentors: the old moralists, Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Steen; the first social critics, Francisco Goya; the German Expressionists and their Neue Sachlichkeit successors, who by returning to realism were able to give an even sharper insight into human vanity. The latter connects with Surrealism’s interest in the unconscious world that lies hidden in our everyday lives. ‘I’ is more than simply ‘I’ and this multiple layering is also to be found in the world around us.

Concerning the atmosphere in Hanselaar’s work there is also a link to be made with that evoked in the work of two artists associated with Surrealism: namely the brothers Pierre Klossowski and Balthus. Despite Hanselaar’s similarities with these two painters, who dealt with the Freudian notion of man’s polymorphous perversity, it is above all the differences that are interesting: these two men adopted a very masculine standpoint whereas Hanselaar interprets the feminine experience. Hans Bellmer, with his trussed-up dolls, comes closer to her world.

In any case, much art since 1945 has been characterised by the marriage of Surrealism and Expressionism. The New Figuration of the 1970s employed this fusion as a reaction against 1

an abstraction that had become hollow, which had come to symbolise a void. Art wished to return to dealing with life. That is also what Marcelle Hanselaar has done. One can draw a connection between her interest in the depiction of the specifically feminine experience and the realm of the senses and the recent trend in painting represented by Marlene Dumas, which also deals with discomfort of the body and the equivalent value attached to all the body’s parts, including those we normally hide. Another common feature of their work is that their starting point is not an observation of reality, but rather a recollection of it. It concerns memory.

In this work objects take on a symbolic meaning, which is why I refer to this contemporary movement in painting as Neosymbolism. It is characterised by the use of muted tones: grisailles, off whites, pale browns, dirty pinks etc. By contrast, bright colours dominate Marcelle Hanselaar’s work: pure blues, brilliant reds, acid greens and outspoken yellows. But in her etchings they take on a similarly alienating haziness because the technique of ‘spitbite’ aquatint has often a blurred velvety quality. In addition to the blocks of colour Hanselaar uses to set the scene for the confined spaces (Sartre’s play Huis Clos comes to mind) in which her characters – often including the artist herself – perform their symbolic acts, Hanselaar also employs her multicoloured palette to, as it were, apply make-up to her figures.

One would not expect to find a discussion of technique in this paragraph, but this brings us to the philosophy of her work. The man we need here is the Nietzsche-inspired French philosopher and erotic author Georges Bataille. “Woman”, he writes, “tends by nature to adornment.” This is no misplaced misogynist jocularity, but an expression of the theoretical source of the second phase of feminism in which emancipation meant not so much equality with men, but rather a distinction from them seen from the viewpoint of so-called differential thinking. Nietzsche begins his Beyond Good and Evil with: “Supposing truth to be a woman…”

Truth is a woman, but not as the philosopher – the man – would have her: identifiable, tangible, unequivocal and accessible. This is Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of this statement. Her erotic sovereignty poses before the man as an unremitting capriciousness.

Truth – as woman – appears to give herself up to every philosopher – as man. But this is merely a game. Woman/truth knows that this is a bottomless pit. Actually this hallucinatory shadow play never dips beneath the surface. “Because if truth is a woman, she knows that there is no truth… that man does not possess the truth”, writes Derrida.

Hanselaar’s starting point is the knowledge that demonstrations of truth and moral patterns oppress life itself with superfluous constructions. Someone once wrote that Marcelle exposes “the dark side of the female psyche”. But does she not in fact show us the light side? Indeed don’t our well-behaved, conformist little lives also have their dark side, as the main theme of today’s art makes clear? And do we see the real light only when we turn it out, as we divest ourselves of our clothes along with one of the many masks of our excessive urges.

It seems to me that Marcelle Hanselaar subscribes to this way of thinking. Her figures take part in adventures. Not as ‘affairs’, but the full intensity of life, which is experienced precisely though naked physicality with all that that entails: passion and joy alongside frustration and sorrow; pleasure and pain; imprisoned within ourselves, hankering after the world without, but afraid to let it in, in case it is the big bad wolf.

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The seamstress, who sews up her own womanhood in the first print from the series of etchings La Petite Mort, operates not between the thighs but hides herself between the ears. Who has muzzled the passionately entwined couple in etching no.15? Who has swathed the woman in barbed wire in number no.12? Who has laced up the corset in no.3? Who has made cripples of the man in no.3 and the woman in no. 14? In no.11 of the series we find the answer: the iconic representation of the authority of the church, which one all too quickly attempts to equate with the State. By the way, Bataille too employed ‘la petite mort’ as a synonym for the orgasm.

In Hanselaar’s paintings we encounter the same themes as in her extremely powerful etchings.

Her canvases are somewhat less narrative and are therefore more symbolic icons of femininity. Women continue to occupy centre stage, surrounded by attributes, objects or animals, which function symbolically. The clutched pillow represents tenderness and protection, but as a surrogate it also stands for loneliness. The scars, like graffiti, refer to lived experiences and suffering. The love for a bird has caged him. The dog has given his name to the hot-dog. The teddy bear was not suitable for this. Alongside the adult woman there is a little girl who often takes up the position of observer. Marcelle as a child? The innocent looks on in amazement at her foolishness. The man in her work is a pathetic figure. When the woman is finally given a good seeing to, it is from behind by the devil or his shadow (no.17).

This clarifies one of the many but problematic differences between pornography and eroticism. The feminist cliché says that pornography violently oppresses women. Not suitable for children. In the erotic, the woman is the director who follows her own scenario. So too with Georges Bataille. Women take the lead in his stories. The man looks on, fascinated but submissive. She determines those boundaries which may be transgressed. In one of the etchings a man reads de Sade, so that he is undoubtedly familiar with the Frenchman’s idea that taboos are there to be broken and boundaries are there to be transgressed. Only then does one encounter jouissance.

The figure that represents this transgression in Hanselaar’s œuvre is the monkey, symbol of unbridled sensuality. Our ancestor, sitting in the trees, reminds us of our nature. Culture is a fine thing, but it is in the first instance a form of repression: the domestication of our desires.

The unusual is whittled down. Non-conformity is reined in. The monkey does not colour within the lines. He symbolises the battle against cultural levelling.

Marcelle Hanselaar’s œuvre is erotic. This term should not be misinterpreted. Just as ‘aesthetic’ does not mean beautiful, but refers to the domain within which to examine the nature of the design, neither does ‘erotic’ mean that the work is titillating, but rather that it reflects upon the zones of physical attraction. That is what happens in her work. Her answer connects to a philosophical movement that departs from material reality. She harks back to the philosophers of ancient antiquity. This way of thinking is seldom appreciated by the representatives of rationalism, who are blinded by their devotion to theology. In the twentieth century Georges Bataille breathed new life into this view of the world. He called his thought ‘atheology’, which champions ‘heterology’: the theory of the appreciation of difference.

Marcelle Hanselaar connects with this through her imagery. Jean-François Lyotard described this connection as the philosopher and artist as brothers-in-arms.

Willem Elias, professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel Chairman of The Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK.

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