Nelleke Cloosterman

Nov 25

‘Dawn goes down to day’

25.11.2023 — 07.01.2024

Playing with chance through a book of poetry for each day of the year, Cloosterman picked a poem that was to give title to her exhibition, choosing only the date which she (wrongfully) thought to be the opening of her debut solo at PLUS-ONE gallery.

‘Dawn goes down to day,’ a verse from Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay,’ came to be providential. It reflects the artist’s considerations on the impermanence of things and the transience of life, which in themselves are imbued of a sense of constant transformation. In Cloosterman’s work, the impossibility of freezing time reveals itself not so much in death as part of life, but rather in everyday’s rebirth.

With a series of works developed in London, where the artist has been based for a year now, the exhibition represents a new moment in her practice and life. Holding a special place in this move, the installation ‘Her early leaf’s a flower’, also named after a line in the Frost poem, is the result of the laborious and painful but liberating gesture of cutting out a dozen paintings from earlier stages in her practice in the shapes of local tree leaves (oak, maple, etc.) that she collected during bike rides from home to her studio.

As a rite of passage, the artist symbolically lets go of her old self to embrace a new beginning, and at the same time gives her works an afterlife. While the symbolism of rebirth, personal growth and transformation as an act of freedom is recurrently manifest in the artist’s paintings through images of butterflies, for instance, here it emanates through the work’s processual characteristics and its reference to falling leaves – another symbol seen in the canvases that could also be attributed the meaning of peace.

(Excerpt of the exhibition text written by Daniella Géo, 2023)

Nelleke Cloostermen (°1996) lives and works in London, United Kingdom (UK).
Nelleke Cloosterman’s recent works are mainly composed of what she calls modern-day vanitas paintings. With added elements compared to her previous still life vocabulary and a wider colour palette, both reflecting life in the city, the paintings turn around the precepts of the classical genre. Although inscribed in this art tradition with reminders of life’s fragility, the works here exhibited are not meant to convey moralistic messages. The notions of faulty life goals and futility of earthly pleasures, typical of the historical Christian depictions, are more truly embraced in their ordinariness, a human experience as much as any other. Moreover, the artist aims to escape from the rigidity of proclaimed meanings and let the viewer find their own ways within this fragmentary collage-like realm, as does the wingless yet flying bird which is a major symbol in Cloosterman's practice that could be seen as a self-portrait.
The combination of familiar objects that are not likely to be seen together (beer, vases from the British museum, cats, etc.) set in an indeterminate spacetime borders a surrealist take on reality. In fact, it is but the paintings’ more visible layer. Through transparency, images of open portals and windows, as well as through bas reliefs of scratched drawings on the underlayer, one can catch a glimpse of this other world of gradients, bubbles, branches, and flowers. Whether metaphysical, spiritual, or utopic, this representation appears intertwined with that of the mundane. Seemingly, the series proposes less of a dialectic approach of opposing sides, and more of a concession to their part in human experience. Estranged from a devout religious upbringing, the artist’s wish for openness in meaning reinforces the understanding that, as a construct, it is subject to change. A single concept cannot account for life and the world.