Worlds and realities
Good morning, everybody and welcome to this exhibition. Welcome to Aldebran Studio and, if you have never experienced it before, welcome to Marcella’s world.
Living in a so-called global village, we may be tempted to believe that this is it, this is all there is – one world, one reality. However, looking at Marcella’s paintings, it is as if she is telling us that this is not true. There are indeed multiple worlds.
Realities differ. Why? We only SEE things differently, once we start LOOKING differently. The artist’s function is this is the following:
In the first place, she must herself look with different eyes and show us her worlds, worlds of remembering, worlds of imagination and fantasy. Secondly, she must “translate” for us those worlds we think we know, in our been-there-seen-that mentality, and make us look at these differently. She is The Seer, showing us other worlds, other realities.
There are of course an unending amount of such realities, but let’s look at a few as we come across them in the paintings.
We start with something commonplace, something ordinary – The happy housewives, of which there are two paintings on this exhibition. What can be more boring than the world of the housewife, what reality more disenchanting? Yet Marcella shows us that even here things aren’t what they superficially seem, there is an overlapping of realities. The happy cook cooks up a storm of fantasy with strange creatures and people coming from a fairy castle, all within the compass of her small kitchen. The happy dishwasher gets her water from an ocean full of mermaids. And The happy sweeper is busy with a broom dance through an Escher-like landscape of flickering walls and windows and floors.
Then there is the world of the child. This has become a bit of a cliché, but it is nevertheless real. One wonders when you are supposed to leave this world – at 16? 21? 81? Marcella says that we need never leave it, that we should never leave it. You should never give up your passport to the world of the child.
The road to childhood is a winding, forking road: children playing, children’s intense involvement with their environment, with nature, their longings, their belief in happiness. It is also a place of fantasy, of the monster under the bed or the angel next to it. A nine foot angel, perhaps? There are creatures who protect them (Keeping an eye, The bush spirits), strange birds flowing from a pencil (Boy drawing a bird cage), masks growing like flowers in a garden (Masked garden), even a machine where you can buy a ticket to happiness.
Of course, fantasy is not limited to the child’s world. Every culture has an existing literature of myths and legends. These are not merely stories, they are events happening in different worlds, different realities. Marcella extends the body of myths by creating her own. Some are parallel realities, the spirits you only see from the corner of your eye, as in Myth of the rainbird and Myth of the secret hand. Some are pure fantasy, but with references to other mythologies and symbols, as in Myth of the uroboros and Myth of the soul’s journey.
The paintings become bridges to other worlds which we are either unable or too scared to reach on our own. Indeed, it is not just about fantasy and joy. There are fears that we can face by means of these images. The artist translates our fears, she imagines them, makes images of them and so doing gives us the ability to face them. She is our subconscious, confronting us by means of dream images with the things we do not really want to see.
Let’s look at the three death paintings – Death is a beautiful blue flower I, II and III. We see that death is not really so terrible, it is manageable, it is definable. Death is only another world, another reality, a rare blue flower.
In Sunset, Marcella has us looking at the underlying animal in us all, our fear of losing control, of becoming inhuman once the sun sets. And then there is loneliness – in The glass garden you can surround yourself with a labyrinth of reflections, a place to hide from the world outside.
Reflections are also a way of looking, even if it is “through a glass darkly”. In Waters under the earth a reality is incompletely reflected and we can just imagine something of a mystery.
I hope that Marcella’s paintings will have us all looking again – with different eyes, through different windows, through mirrors and reflections – and that we may find here something of the multiplicity of worlds. And maybe also a little mystery.
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