Series / themes

Text on the occasion of the exhibition Tinder Times: Monument voor de Liefde, by Rob Perrée (curator/writer/critic)

A boy meets a girl and falls in love. Her father does not approve. A story like a cliché, you think. In the end she rejects him and marries a doctor, a better match. The boy does not give up. He knows he must wait for his chance. He lives his life and has his affairs, without depth. When, after fifty-one years, nine months and four days, his beloved becomes a widow, he courts her anew. Makes himself vulnerable once more. It pays off. It turns out that love can be lasting and is not bound to age. The game of love has lost none of its force. "It was as if they had skipped the arduous ordeal of married life and gone straight to the heart of love." With Love in the Time of Cholera (1986), Gabriel García Márquez built a monument for love by letting imagination into reality.

In the exhibition Tinder Times, encounters lie at the root of the works. They are almost always fleeting encounters. When the artist meets men on or through the internet, you could say she consciously chooses transience. That is inherent to the medium. Many other encounters — chance or not — are at this moment forcibly fleeting, because a deadly virus makes real physical contact impossible. In both cases the artist puts herself in a vulnerable position, because the longings cannot be answered. Love, or potential love, is deferred, as it were.

The Tinder Times series has a concrete, familiar origin: the dating site Tinder. Many singles, but also people with steady partners, are on that site. Out of curiosity, out of boredom or out of lust, to score a one-night stand or to find a partner. Marijke de Vries is single, 60+, and some time ago decided to turn Tinder into a project. A step that shows courage, because she makes herself extremely vulnerable by it. She invites men to pose for her, nude or otherwise. The men posed in her studio. Corona eventually put an end to that. In principle it is the classic division of roles: a model poses for the artist. The latter keeps her clothes on. Of every serious candidate De Vries paints a rapid sketch: rough outlines with minimal filling-in. Sometimes the nakedness is emphasised, sometimes it is left open. The model paintings are made on layered paper: newsprint below and rice paper on top. The crumpled papers breathe the transience of the act. The portraits are exhibited as autonomous works in a transparent, more or less closed-off space, giving the viewer a peepshow experience — but in fact they are the most important source of inspiration for collages and paintings. The quality of that inspiration is undoubtedly determined by the degree to which the artist's longings and her need for intimacy are aroused. In this way the artist still seems to probe the limits of the classic division of roles, giving the paintings — they are really more like drawings — an erotic charge that the viewer can experience too.

In the transition from these working drawings to the other, the 'real' works, De Vries gives imagination free rein. In the spirit of Márquez she lets imagination lift everyday reality to another level, so that it acquires a magical edge. The works are executed on linen or on and behind perspex. They are collages built up from a great number of visual elements. These can be painted forms, blots of paint, but also rough pieces of silver foil, transparent paper or pieces of plastic. The elements seem to move in space. Sometimes they even seem to want to leave it. Like leaves blown up by the wind. That description suggests chaos, but their strength is precisely their great coherence — the way improvised music can sound like a compact whole. Through the passages of white, but also through the kind of paper or the perspex, they open onto a background on which human figures, or parts of human bodies, sometimes appear. They shimmer through the swirling forms. Because the collages move on the borderland of abstraction and figuration, they invite the viewer to engage their own imagination as well. They seduce the viewer into looking more closely and so seeing more. Now and then the works reminded me of the abstract expressionist work of Willem de Kooning. De Vries's use of colour makes that comparison all the more credible.

When Corona brought daily life to a standstill, the Tinder project stopped too. That did not end the longing for intimacy, for physical contact, for love. A new series of works arose — Love in Times of Corona — related to the Tinder works, but in which imagination probably had to work harder to bring the reality of daily life to a bearable level. Is that why, in a few works, I think I see falling men behind a 'décor' of visual elements?

Marijke de Vries trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She was then active as an artist for years. Because she tends to follow her instincts at important junctures, at a certain point she turned towards music and dance. The tango in particular. For years she organised dance festivals and made choreographies. In 2015 she decided to return to her first love, visual art. A residency in Spain lay at its origin. The mobility of, and the movement in, many works still betray that turn towards dance. Is the tango not also an encounter in which the partners make themselves vulnerable, give in to their longing, without knowing whether the transience of that encounter will lead to more? Rob Perrée Amsterdam, 30 September 2020.

How is love doing in times of Corona, when you are single and dating in the 1.5-metre society?

We must avoid each other, yet we are looking for love. Human contact has changed; we keep our distance as much as we can. Skin hunger, caution. Every stranger is a possible danger.

Meanwhile I am working on 'Tinder Times', about online dating. The project has several layers and angles. It consists of a programme around an exhibition of my work, opening (postponed by Corona) in November 2020, with thanks to the AFK.

One part of the project consists of painting Tinder dates. Painting live is of course no longer possible. I paint dates through online sessions. This turn changes the perspective: that of my iPhone.

Love nestles in stories of the soul that lead to layered works about dreams, yearnings, separation anxiety and memories.

The work 'Liefde in tijden van Corona' is one of the works from the series of the same name. The world seems to be falling apart into pieces. A figure moves in free fall through a fragmented universe. Yet this movement also expresses a synthesis, in which the pieces come together into a new image.

In the project Tinder Times the artist combines a classic medium — she works primarily from painting — with a contemporary phenomenon: dating through a digital platform such as Tinder. 'Tinder Times' is an artistic investigation into online dating in which De Vries engages with current social themes such as transience, sexual identity, role patterns and changing forms of relationships, touching on contemporary feminism as well. At the same time it is a personal investigation in which the date is the occasion for the artwork. Making art about this subject is her artistic response to the transience of the virtual world, and a way to transform it.

Curator Fleur Feringa: In her project Tinder Times, Marijke de Vries opens a taboo-breaking conversation about sexuality in an online era. She breaks through role patterns and challenges the viewer to let go of shame and judgement. Marijke de Vries connects the digital dating world, so often aimed at brief contact, to a universal longing for intimacy. The online and offline encounters Marijke had in the course of Tinder Times have resulted in a series of model drawings and more abstract multimedia works. Longing, tension and fleeting contact are made tangible in a tender way. The artworks and the exhibition at Sexyland form a starting point for dialogue about a subject that touches everyone: sexuality and connection. In the exhibition we deliberately seek out a voyeuristic character in the presentation, to give visitors a sense of participation. In the surrounding programme we reverse the roles and ask visitors and participants about their own experiences.

The layers of reality

The Perspex series originated on the occasion of an artist-in-residency in 2015 in Spain, following a commission from a Spanish gallery. Working in mixed techniques between and on the layers of perspex brings richness and variety to the use of material.

The technique expresses De Vries's themes of change, transparency and layeredness.

The work relates to time through its theme of constant change. Reality as we perceive it is not static; we cannot experience 'all there is' in time. This dynamic of change and transformation is present in the perspex works. Theme and style refer to a layered world of meaning that is always coming into being and always changing. A premonition of the not-yet visible, a reminiscence of the almost dissolved, already leaving the picture plane (and sometimes becoming sculptural).

Layeredness — technique and meaning

In a period of my life I was invited to make work by a silkscreen printer. What fascinated and touched me in working with that 'simple' technique is that, through the clear superimposition of form and colour, the earlier reality or state of the work is transformed while still shimmering through. With the unruliness of paint, such an effect is much harder to achieve. It is something I look for when I paint. And in working with the layering of perspex. The different states and layers that life adds, as it were, through which an earlier core shimmers. It evokes a nostalgia of 'being underway', leaving its traces.