Tramaine de Senna
Che Go Eun
Manon van den Eeden
3/3
FRED&FERRY GALLERY
04.03-01.04.2023
Imagine bedside lamps oozing a warm light in a plush bedroom. Illusionistic patterns on neon coloured wallpaper. Dimly lit ticking radiators. Each triggers a distinct atmosphere.
The word 'atmosphere' has long been used to describe "moods in the air, the emotional tinge of a space", as Gernot Böhme once wrote. The German philosopher has provided insightful analyses of what atmospheres are and how they come about. According to him, atmospheres are intangible totalities; they imbue everything. They communicate a feeling, by unifying "a diversity of impressions". These impressions could be of certain lights, sounds, objects. What matters with these sensory things is not just their concrete production, but "the way in which they radiate outwards into space". What matters is "the imaginative idea the observer receives through the object". For finally, atmospheres are nothing without the sentient subject. They might emanate from (a constellation of) objects, but they need to be experienced in order to exist.Thinking about atmospheres hence means thinking about space, object and subject.
It is this thinking that binds the practices of Tramaine de Senna, Che Go Eun and Manon van den Eeden. All three of them look at their surroundings with sustained attention. They aim to materialize the immaterial: fleeting moments in which things accumulate. Their sculptural objects are charged with multiple memories, emotions, sensations; with references, histories and meanings. They are hence simultaneously condensations and evocations of atmospheres. The visitor has to engage with them, has to be present in the physical and/or mental space, in order for them to open up.
Although the works are different in their formalism - from the minimalist to the maximalist - the materials share a seducing quality. Shimmering sequins, reflecting mirrors, glossy surfaces - the works presented in this exhibition lure the visitor in. Moreover, these works bear witness to the everyday - plates, vases, domestic interiors - but in an open-ended way. Every artwork is the embodiment of an intense process of decision-making to allow for numerous readings.
In her practice, Manon van den Eeden especially plays with this ambiguity between form and function, between fake, real and hyperreal. An Unheimlichkeit permeates her works: neatly finished, recognizable objects are rendered unfamiliar, unreliable even, because they are magnified, multiplied, merged, manipulated. Hereby she usually combines manual labour and digital technologies. This is also the case in the sculptural floor installation on display. The lighthearted randomness, much like that of a playful spinning top, is paired with a tense strictness. The movement of the works consequently prompts visitors to become aware of their movements in space as well. Moreover, they provide a score for the exhibition - but is it rhythmical or claustrophobic? Trapped between rotating and falling, in a seemingly endless in-between state, one wonders: what does this equilibrium really entail? What universe do these plates represent?
The combination of analogue and digital technologies also characterises the work of Che Go Eun. Trained in traditional Korean painting, she now mainly works with digital imagery in various ways, including printing, 3D rendering and XR. However, references to art history, religious iconography and cyberculture are layered in her idiosyncratic visual language. Whereas her previous works have dealt with contemporary issues such as gender, social constructs, violence and ethics, these works were more personal from the outset. She had an AI application generate images based on sentences from her diary or how she was feeling. These images she then combined and edited, only to remake them as watercolour drawings on translucent paper. This was an important step: the handmade introduces a deeper feeling of something human, beyond the flatness of the digital. These drawings were then translated again into digital wallpaper collages. The use of wallpapers was partly inspired by director Park Chan-wook, who often uses them as a means to express the emotional state of his characters. By installing these wallpapers in relation to matching cut-out shaped mirrors in the gallery, Che Go Eun created similar narrative, immersive spaces, each with a contrasting atmosphere. They serve as intimate invitations to reflect on and talk about mental processes. What can you discern in the patterns? Do the purple hues make you melancholic? What are you reminded of? Where are you drifting off to? Can you muster to stay and look in the mirror?
What things appear to be, what they are and what they mean is not necessarily the same - and it is precisely this that Tramaine de Senna scrutinizes. In her work, the visual and the conceptual are intertwined. She is interested in what she calls "the migration of forms", the ways in which imagery, themes, design disseminate - for example how nuclear violence eventually found its way in the imagining of Godzilla, or how Streamline Modernism influenced the design of domestic appliances. She often mixes complex histories, personal memories, recurring motifs in material culture, and pop cultural references. Thereby she plays with colour palettes - be they bubblegum nillies or Technicolour - and with materials - their textures and tactility, their surfaces and sizes. There is an exuberance in her works that speaks of an intense creation process. Making work is a visceral experience for her; it is figuring things out whilst doing them, acquiring a skill and then bending all its rules and parameters. It is a concatenation of attempts, approximations. The works in the exhibition are very much in line with this. Not only did she make a quilted wall piece, translating earlier drawings in textile form, she also made 3 ceramic objects. The vessels carry within them already various associations - for instance art historically they reference the still life and as a container to carry something, they remind of the human body. However, de Senna added many more - amongst others that seafood also was commonly featured in nature morte paintings, and that as a child, de Senna wore a pair of shorts with a noodle print. All her works hence attest to her wide ranging research topics, their form being an embodiment of all these stories.
So it goes for the works of the three artists in this exhibition: they literally and figuratively contain all the concepts, images and technologies that accrued over time, all the worlds they inhabit, all the atmospheres they speak of.
Eline Verstegen
