Emmanuel Van der Meulen

Emmanuel Van der Meulen
Period: 2012-2013
Profession: Painter “Here, there, up, down, running, [l’eau] never knows stillness, neither in its course nor in its nature; it has nothing of its own, but takes hold of everything, borrowing as many diverse natures as are diverse the places crossed, as the mirror welcomes within itself as many images as there are objects passing in front of it.” Leonardo da Vinci, Notebook (C.A 171 r.a) “The question of painting does not belong first and foremost to painters, or even less to aestheticians alone. It belongs to visibility itself, and therefore to everyone – to the common sensation.” Jean-Luc Marion,
La croisée du visible “A famous photograph from 1968 shows Walter De Maria posing on an asphalt road, his legs spread on either side of a continuous white line and his arms raised in two lines parallel to the edges of the line on the ground. This image calls to mind a famous work by the American artist, conceived in the same year: the chalk lines of
Mile-Long Drawing in the Desert, drawn with a marking truck in the Mojave Desert. With these gestures, Walter De Maria signified that the material “soil” and the measurement “line”, which everywhere on earth enable a piece of land to be identified, were now the necessary and sufficient presupposition for sculpture. Similar elements can be found in Emmanuel Van der Meulen’s paintings: a surface (the central flat) and lines (the bands of color). We can therefore put forward the hypothesis that for Emmanuel Van der Meulen, the (painted) surface and its (colored) marking are the necessary and sufficient presupposition of painting. Let me continue the parallel. By filling a gallery with earth for his exhibition
50 m3 Level Dirt , Walter De Maria brought the raw material – pure dirt, pure earth, pure soil – to the center of sculpture, and invited the viewer to consider the earth as a proposition to which he or she simply had to acquiesce in order to gain access to aesthetic enjoyment, it being understood that the earth was there not only to be seen, but also to be thought about. In the same way, Emmanuel Van der Meulen questions painting – pure color, pure surface, pure thickness – in the space of the canvas. In so doing, he invites the viewer to go beyond the recognition of what there is to see on the canvas, to the experience of painting itself (“le tableau comme expérience du visible”). The slight but effective variations from one work to the next serve to re-engage the act of seeing with each new painting. And in this act of seeing, aesthetic delight and the thought of painting mingle. Let me continue the parallel. In the 1968 exhibition
Earth Works at the Virginia Dawn gallery in New York, Walter De Maria presented a large canvas painted yellow, in the middle of which was a metal panel with the inscription: “The Color Men Choose When They Attack The Earth”. This was the color of construction machinery. We can speculate that Emmanuel Vander Meulen’s use of color stems from the same desire, albeit in the opposite direction and signified in a more abstract way, to confront what belongs to nature with what belongs to human action. Or, to put it another way, to confront what belongs to the intrinsic characteristics of painting with what belongs to its history, what belongs to its materiality with what belongs to its conceptualization. In Emmanuel Van der Meulen’s painting, there is a real, if secret, presence of raw, natural, moving materials: skies, waters, soils, but also walls and roads. These, or at least some of their characteristics, are studied in their slightest variations. Simply put, this is not a direct study, but an approach by analogy, through the study of the characteristics of one of their equivalents in painting: the color applied to the surface.” Excerpt from a text by Sophie Kaplan,
La couleur, comme la boue et comme l’eau, change toujours un peu en séching, published in the catalog
Chronochromie published in 2009 on the occasion of a solo exhibition at the galerieJean Fournier.